


What's Done Will Be Done

by Silikat



Category: BioShock, BioShock Infinite
Genre: Gen, Mirrored from ff.net
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 17:19:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 33,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1396156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silikat/pseuds/Silikat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rosalind had not come into the lab that day expecting to find a brother. Nor had she come to Columbia expecting danger. She was content to stay, working with Robert, ignoring the world around them. She didn't want to change the world. But fate had other plans. (Mirrored from my ff.net account.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Set In Motion

**Author's Note:**

> Mirrored from my ff.net account, and reuploading here for completion's sake. Hope you enjoy the fic, and as ever, comments, criticism and reviews are warmly received. 
> 
> Warnings for: Mild references to blood, violence and death, and spoilers for Bioshock Infinite.
> 
> Disclaimer: Bioshock and all related concepts do not belong to me – so would you kindly not sue?

**CHAPTER ONE – SET IN MOTION**

_As a child, I had a recurring dream in which I was in a room, staring at another girl who both was and was not myself. I never thought, however, that I would end up meeting her. Or, for that matter, that she would prove to be male. Needless to say, my view of the universe has widened considerably within the last few days. My counterpart seems bemused with the whole situation. We do share a lot of similarities in that regard.  
 - From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 12 th of January 1891_

Rosalind Lutece was not having a good day.

It wasn’t the incompetence of her numerous lab assistants that was bothering her. Nor was it the near-constant malfunctions in her lab equipment, making it nearly impossible to get any real work done. It wasn’t even the unending telephone messages from her employer, ordering her to hurry the progress of science just to meet his confused goals. Although, certainly, none of that was helping her mood.

No, the reason that Rosalind Lutece was having a bad day was a lot simpler than that. She was incredibly bored.

Somehow, when she had entered the field of physics, Rosalind had imagined that it would be a lot more interesting than this. Every day she would turn up at the lab with a vague notion that, that day, she would finally get to do something truly earth-shattering. Oh, sure, there was the day she had discovered the basics upon which she was building a floating city. That had been mildly interesting the week she had first discovered it. But the novelty had worn off quickly enough as she realised that was about it on the mind-blowing discoveries front. The Lutece Field was simply failing to hold her interest any more – the daily rituals of carefully measuring atoms had become a chore, especially when that was all she had spent the last few months doing.

All things considered, she needed a break. So as she marched into the lab on that blustery January morning, Rosalind was not expecting much in the way of intellectual stimulation. Her fears were confirmed when she was greeted at the door by one of her lab assistants, holding a broken gizmo and wearing a sheepish expression. She swept him aside with a look of scorn, storming past him into the room and giving its occupants her best death glare. By the terrified looks on their faces, they got the hint and scuttled off to at least pretend to be doing something productive. Sighing, Rosalind cursed the day she was lumbered with such a hopeless batch of lab assistants.

Her lab wasn’t even a particularly interesting location to begin with. Essentially, it was just a set of large rooms, with any actual lab equipment strewn haphazardly across them wherever it would fit. Experiments were conducted when and where she decided they would be, and any assistant foolish enough to question her judgement would pay the price. Such was the price of not having enough money to fund a better-organised space. Her sole source of funding was her employer, a young man whose self-styled prophet act had convinced a couple of rich, influential and (in Rosalind’s opinion) completely gullible people to give him the money to fund his dream of a flying city. She’d call it preposterous but for the fact that the city was rapidly on its way to becoming a reality, something that probably should have felt like more of a triumph than it did.

Having an eccentric employer came with more drawbacks than perks, and the most evident to her was the lack of any sort of proper space in her lab. Not that she really minded, equipment was equipment no matter where they threw it, but the assistants were often prone to complaining about it. That, and the lack of any sort of decoration. Apparently, the drab grey walls and concrete floors did not lend themselves to a happy workforce, which she repeatedly ignored because she didn’t see the point. (Apart from the fact that it made the lab extremely cold in the winter. Perhaps she should look into getting some sort of carpeting in the future, then.)

She did have an office of sorts, which was more realistically just a smaller room that happened to contain a desk and her vitally important notes. Said notes were currently either in a pile on the floor next to the desk or scattered across it chaotically. _I really need a better filing system_ , she mused to herself as she thumbed through yesterday’s findings, which were scrawled onto a yellowing page in blotchy blue ink.

 “Well, at least nothing’s changed,” she said aloud, scowling at the page in front of her. The readings were exactly the same as yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before _that._ Not that she had expected anything else, of course. “It might have just made today somewhat interesting.”

Closing her eyes, she leaned back in her chair slightly, blankly assessing her situation.  If this tedium continued for any longer, she decided, she would have to go insane in protest. The life of a mad scientist did sound rather attractive, even at the cost of a permanent decrease to the credulity of any discoveries she might make. And a marked increase in the chance that something would explode, but if she was insane that probably wouldn’t be as irritating.

With another exasperated sigh, Rosalind opened her eyes. There was no point in delaying the inevitability that she would have to get some work done at some point.

Outside of the office, her lab assistants were busying themselves by procrastinating as efficiently as they could. The four young men seemed to be permanently intimidated by her, a fact that only served to endlessly amuse her. The oldest, a small, thin boy named Walter Francis who looked as though he had never experienced the sun in his life, was the only one who dared approach her, a clipboard clutched in one hand.

“G-good morning, Madame Lutece. How was-” he began to stutter. Rosalind silenced him with a look.

“Francis, if you honestly cared for my thoughts you would have asked me that when I first arrived. As such, you betray your attempt to make up for overpowering the generator yesterday. Get me a cup of tea, will you?” she snapped, a humourless smile creeping onto her lips.

“Y-yes ma’am,” Francis stammered, before darting out of the way. She rolled her eyes briefly at his retreating form, before striding down the corridor and stepping into the grandly-titled Observation Room.

The Observation Room was really just the room where they had set up the first working Lutece Field and left it running for further surveillance. All it contained was the equipment they used to generate the Lutece Field, which consisted of a couple of large, grey machines at the far end of the room, and a few desks that had been dragged in to aid them in recording their observations of the single atom that the Field manipulated. The atom in question had responded by failing to do anything at all for a significantly annoying number of months.

It was tedious enough for Rosalind to consider deactivating the entire thing and progressing with the next stage of the research, but for the fact that they needed to test if the Lutece Field’s effects ever wore off. Discovering that after building a floating city and sending it off into the sky would have some disastrous consequences.

Absently sweeping a loose strand of hair behind her ear, Rosalind picked a clipboard from a nearby desk and made her way over to the equipment, where a lone lab assistant in an oil-stained shirt and threadbare brown waistcoat was frowning at a screen, rubbing his jaw in the most thoughtful pose he seemed to be able to muster.

“Mornin’, Madame Lutece,” he said as she approached, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Wouldja have a look at this? Somethin’ weird goin’ on here...”

“What is it, Wright?”

The young man ran a hand through his dark hair. “Well, the atom seems to be...pulsin’. Or somethin’ like that, anyway. There’s no pattern to it, I’ve been watchin’ for a while now.”

“Hmm.” Rosalind’s brow furrowed as she moved the assistant out of the way, taking his place at the computers. “Let me take a look...”

With a spark of surprise, she peered at the atom displayed before her. Surely enough, it was blinking at her, pulsating and flashing to a mysterious rhythm. If there was some sort of pattern to it, it was extremely complex and completely unfathomable to the human mind. This was highly unusual. She had never seen the atom behave this irregularly before – and it seemed to have started too suddenly to be a complete accident. Wright filled her in as she watched, carefully noting down the exact pattern of pulsing that the atom was displaying.

Apparently, he had come into the lab the previous evening with everything as normal, but twenty minutes ago the atom that they were observing had begun acting erratically. He had no idea what to make of it, and was in fact about to go and find her to see what she thought when she saved him the trouble by walking in.

Rosalind’s eyes narrowed. “Curious,” she muttered, looking down at her notes. In her haste, she had transcribed the pattern as a series of dashes, long and short depending on how long the pulsing lasted. But now that she was looking at them properly, they didn’t really look how she had thought they would. The pattern seemed random, but there was some repetition to it after a while. Not to mention that the ordering of dashes almost seemed familiar to her. In fact, they almost looked like…

“Morse code!” It was as though a switch had turned on suddenly in her brain. Still holding the paper, she ran back to her office, throwing open one of the desk drawers. At the bottom was a long-forgotten, dusty book on Morse Code, which she grabbed before heading back to the Observation Room, her mind reeling.

If it _was_ Morse Code, it meant that somebody was trying to contact her by manipulating an atom. Which was, on the whole, an extremely odd way to try and get into contact with somebody, not to mention inefficient. Her head buzzed with the possibilities. Clearly, this was the work of somebody who was both exceptionally clever and questionably insane. That sounded like the sort of person that Rosalind would want to meet. Silencing a bemused Wright with a glare, Rosalind threw herself down at a nearby desk, Morse Code book open in front of her and, muttering to herself, began to decode.

“Dot dot dash, dash, dash, four dots, dot…”

After a couple of minutes, she found herself staring down at the translated message, her mind filling with more questions than answers.

_I am Robert Lutece. Is there anyone out there?_

The first thing that jumped out at her was the name. Robert Lutece. Rosalind wasn’t sure, but she had a hunch that ‘Lutece’ was not exactly a common name – at least, she had never met another Lutece that wasn’t related to her before. There was almost no way that could be a coincidence. But if it wasn’t a coincidence, then what was it?

Then there was the actual message. ‘Is there anyone out there?’ That was ominous. That implied that the mysterious Mister Lutece was in fact somewhere unconventional, perhaps not even on this world. She was beginning to suspect that the nature of this other person was also rather unorthodox, but she couldn’t prove it. Not without more evidence.

“It’s a message,” she said aloud, startling Wright, whose eyes were beginning to droop. “From one Robert Lutece. He wants to know if there’s anyone ‘out there’, whatever that entails. Do you think we can reply?”

Wright scratched his head. “Well, we’d need to know how the hell he’s manipulatin’ that thing to start with-”

Rosalind smirked. “ _That_ is simple,” she remarked, turning to face the Lutece Field Generator behind her. “I assume that Mister Lutece has something similar to our own Lutece field wherever he is. He must be turning it on and off to generate this effect.” With a grin, she indicated the switches on the side of their own device. “Rather time-consuming, although admittedly the only way to contact somebody on this scale.”

“On this scale?” Wright’s face was contorted into a grimace of confusion as he stared over her shoulder at the decoded message. Rosalind pursed her lips in wry amusement. Perhaps she was expecting a little much for one of her useless lab assistants to actually understand anything she said.

“Yes, Wright. I believe that Mister Lutece is not exactly on the same plane of existence as you and I.”

“What?!” Wright boggled at her, his deep brown eyes wide as saucers.

“It _is_ only a hypothesis at this point,” she admitted with a casual wave of her hand. “But given that we both have the ability to influence this same atom, and we are the only ones in this room with the necessary equipment set up, I would say that it is a rather likely one, wouldn’t you?”

He continued to stare at her as though she had spontaneously metamorphosed into a large octopus right there in front of him. “...right,” he said, finally. “And what, exactly, are we gonna say to him?”

She was already back at the desk, translating her response into Morse. “Well, I had thought that ‘hello’ would suffice. Unless you have something more suitable in mind?”

“Uh-”

“I didn’t think so. Come on. I need your assistance.”

On the screen, the atom had stabilised, returning to its dormant state. This other Lutece appeared to have stopped transmitting. It was time to send out a message of her own, then. Motioning for Wright to man one of the many banks of switches, Rosalind made her way over to the side of one of the machines, where a large lever labelled ‘ON/OFF’ was attached to the cold metal. Working together, the pair turned the machine on and off in sequence, making the atom on the screen glow and pulse to itself. Somewhere, she hoped, a man named Robert was watching on a similar screen, translating her message back to plain English with a little book similar to hers.

_I am Rosalind Lutece. Who exactly are you?_

Panting with exertion, Wright wiped his forehead with a sleeve. Rosalind rolled her eyes at him. Her assistant was proving to be quite the drama queen. Turning the Field off and on wasn’t _that_ exhausting.

“We only sendin’ it once, Madame Lutece?” he asked, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand. She shook her head, returning to her observing the screen.

“That shan’t be necessary. He should be watching for a response – and if he isn’t, then sending it multiple times shall only serve to tire you more.”

Wright cringed and mumbled an apology, but Rosalind’s attention was already diverted back to the screen. The readings were going erratic again; it seemed as though their contact was indeed paying attention.

_Lutece also? Interesting. Why are you observing my particle?_

She frowned as she finished deciphering the message. That wasn’t the question that she was expecting, and to be perfectly honest she had no idea how to go about answering it. How much was this stranger expecting her to tell him? He might not be a particularly trustworthy individual, although Rosalind had a hunch that she could predict his actions just as well as she could predict her own. After a moment’s thought, she and Wright transmitted their reply.

_I was observing it first._

_That doesn’t answer my question._

The answer was almost instantaneous, which made her smirk. Apparently, Mister Lutece tolerated fools about as well as she did. She bit her lip, staring at her Morse book. What could she say that didn’t reveal too much about herself?

_I suspect for the same reason that you are, Mr Lutece._

_Curious. Where exactly are you?_

That made her pause. If her suspicions were correct, then this Robert should have come to the same conclusion that she had – suggesting that, in fact, she was wrong about him and how they were communicating. But that couldn’t be possible. For one, she was never wrong. But more importantly, there was no possible way that he could be manipulating her atom without her noticing.

The thought that he was being deliberately vague crossed her mind. Yes, perhaps he was testing her, to see if she was up to par intellectually.

_Haven’t you suspected?_

_I want you to confirm it._

_I am in my laboratory._

_Don’t be sarcastic._

As entertaining as their banter was, it wasn’t getting them anywhere. With a thoughtful frown, Rosalind attempted to move the conversation onwards.

_You share my suspicion though, don’t you?_

_That we are speaking across realities._

She grinned. So she was right. Of course. There was no way that she could have been wrong, really, but there is always a margin for doubt in any experiment. She straightened her blazer before manning the switch again, musing as she did so that this was proving to be just the distraction that she had been looking for.

_Indeed. Unless you are a long lost cousin._

_If that were the case I think a telephone might be an easier way to communicate._

She rolled her eyes derisively, chuckling as she did. It seemed that they shared a sense of humour, at least.

_Now you’re being sarcastic._

_Maybe. Here, then, my exact coordinates._

The stream of numbers that followed was exactly the same as her own coordinates. Rosalind was grinning as she encrypted her next transmission. It _was_ true. This Robert Lutece was not only remarkably similar to her; if her suspicions were correct, they were the one and same person, just in different realities.

“This is astounding,” she muttered, more for her own benefit than Wright’s. “You realise, we are communicating with a different, but parallel universe? Right at this very moment, we are speaking to someone in a place that nobody in our entire universe has ever communicated with before!”

Bemused by the lack of a response, she turned to see that Wright had fallen asleep against the bank of machines. She tutted. Typical. What did he expect her to do, send these vitally important messages herself? Some people were just so inconsiderate. Turning back, she began to operate the power switch again.

_Our suspicions are confirmed, then._

_I have yet to see any evidence._

_I can hardly give you my coordinates back. They are the same._

_I’ll take your word for it._

She rolled her eyes. Perhaps that meant that her counterpart was not prepared to be as trusting as she was. That was fair enough. She did have solid evidence for their theory; he did not, and she couldn’t think of any way to prove it to him at that exact moment. However, he appeared to have reached the same conclusions as her, even with that lack of evidence. She had to admit, it was impressive.

_In any case, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr Lutece. In a manner of speaking._

_The pleasure is all mine, Madame Lutece. It’s not every day that one meets oneself._

Standing back from the Lutece Field, Rosalind smirked. Yes, this did look as though it was going to be an interesting enough diversion for the time being.


	2. A Window Into Probability

**CHAPTER TWO – A WINDOW INTO PROBABILITY**

_Having met my male counterpart, I should have been satisfied. The knowledge of other universes – that there exists an infinite series of places based on the infinite choices we make and their multitude of outcomes – should be astonishing enough alone. Yet I find myself yearning for more. I want to know who I am in this other world; or rather, who he is. I want to see it. Simply knowing it exists is not enough.  
\- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 12 th of April 1892_

It had been three months since Rosalind Lutece had first made contact with her counterpart in another reality. Three months, and to her mind that was at least two months too long without them ever actually meeting.

Not that she particularly disliked their current means of communication. It just got a little tiresome, using her Lutece Field as a glorified telegraph when there had to be some easier way to talk. Using the Field as a glorified telephone would be one step, but face-to-face contact was a far more preferable idea.

In their laconic way, the pair had discussed it a few times. Robert initially thought that the venture was nigh-impossible, but Rosalind had a few ideas in mind. Getting across some of the more complex scientific concepts to him in Morse Code had proven difficult, but they had somehow managed it. Her idea was novel – they would attempt to rip a hole in their respective realities, creating a sort of ‘tear’ that they could look through. The concept was easy enough, given their former experience with talking across universes. Actualising it was proving to be the difficult part.

Really, it was lucky that the scientific part of building her employer’s floating city was mostly over. Her task in it these days mostly seemed to involve constructing and setting up the various Lutece Field generators beneath the buildings that Comstock’s other employees were manufacturing. Thankfully, this was a task that was easily delegated to her assistants, leaving her essentially free to work on her own project, which suited her perfectly.

That project, however, was shaping up to be one of the more impossible things that she had ever done, and given that she had managed to suspend atoms in space and contact people across universes, that was saying a lot. The fact that she and her counterpart were so alike in their metal processes was a godsend; it certainly made the planning processes a lot easier. Sometimes, he interrupted her mid-transmission just to finish her sentences, and she had increasingly found herself doing likewise. Some may have called it madness. She called it a good work ethic, and was determined to continue doing it for as long as it took to get the project finished.

Her lab assistants, meanwhile, were spending their whole time giving her strange looks when they thought she couldn’t see her, and having hushed conversations in the corridors that were hastily silenced whenever she walked past. She wasn’t surprised. None of her peons really understood the complexity of what she was doing. Wright was the only one who had actually been there when she was contacting Robert, and he had fallen asleep halfway through the conversation.

They must have thought she was mad to spend her whole time holed up in one small room, talking to someone who, as far as they knew, didn’t actually exist. She didn’t exactly blame them. It wasn’t as though she was going to tell them what she was doing – they were far too clumsy and inexperienced for that. Talking to Robert was something only she could do, lest he get bored and abandon them completely.

Still, she was content. As long as word did not get back to her employer that she wasn’t technically spending _all_ of their funding on the designated project, she could continue as she was.

On that particular day, she had arrived at the lab early. This was no extraordinary occurrence; she had developed a habit of coming to work early now that she actually had something interesting to occupy her time. But nevertheless, she was early, strolling into the lab with her usual brown jacket rumpled, her shirt still slightly oil stained from the day before and a small tear in the hem of her skirt. Her hair, too, was slowly becoming unpinned from its neat structure by the slight breeze that was rolling through the street when she made her way up to the lab.

Rosalind noticed all of these elements with a practiced eye as she passed her reflection in a shop window, but ignored them on principle. She was a scientist, not a fashion designer, and she didn’t have the time to be concerned about her physical appearance. Besides, any work she put into maintaining it would quickly be undone by some small incident in the lab. It often seemed that looking occasionally shabby was the price she had to pay for not getting better equipment while she still had the chance.

Pushing the door open, she greeted a still-timid Francis before stepping into the Observation Room, as she did every morning. That small room was where she had spent most of the last four months. Since she had first contacted Robert, it had undergone a couple of renovations to help ease the Lutece Field’s workings, but the main addition was in the centre of the room. Where the measurement machines for the Lutece Field had been stood another, large machine of her own design.

It towered above everyone who entered the room, a patchwork monstrosity of cobbled-together metals and grafted-on levers and buttons. Its overall shape was similar to that of a large, metallic bell jar, with a hollow arch for a centre that was just tall enough for her to stand in. The whole contraption was raised onto a platform, at the centre of which was a pair of exposed antennae that beckoned upwards to an identical pair embedded in the top of the arch, pointing downwards.

She called it the ‘Lutece Tear’, and it was her proudest achievement.

In theory, the machine would produce a tear between realities in the centre of the arch, allowing her to contact her counterpart much more easily. The problems were twofold; first, creating the tear and second, containing it. The former was infinitely less severe than the latter, but neither especially mattered to her. Rosalind was ready to take the risk. A little spatial collapse wasn’t going to hurt the universe – not in any way that was traceable back to her, anyway.

According to Robert, he had also built the same machine in the exact same position in his own universe. They had prearranged a time; the pair of them planned to pull the switch on their respective machines at nine AM precisely, in theory punching a hole through their respective realities that would allow them to finally see each other. This was, in fact, their thirteenth attempt at the experiment since the pair of them had completed work on the prototype Lutece Tears. The first twelve had yielded no results, something which Robert saw as a sign that they were probably barking up the wrong tree. But Rosalind was determined, and so he had agreed to give it another few tries, on the condition that he was allowed to gloat if he was correct.

Slumping into one of the desk chairs, she glanced towards the alarm clock that stood on top of the scattered junk that made up her desk space. Twenty three minutes to go. Ample time to call in one of the lab assistants to witness this moment of hypothetical glory. She had the feeling, however, that none of them would wish to stand around and see her new project whirr into action, only to shut down anticlimactically and prompt yet another round of unprofessional, unladylike, yet rather inventive swearing from Rosalind.

No, she wasn’t expecting much from this experiment, just as she hadn’t expected much from the previous experiments that they had performed, but there was no harm in trying. After all, both Luteces were determined to make this project work, to properly see each other through the barrier of their separate universes. It was partly a testament to their shared scientific curiosity, and partly a sign of their growing friendship. The Luteces got on exceedingly well, as one might expect of two people who were technically the same person. It was only natural that they wanted to meet.

She must have dozed off, leaning on her desk with one elbow, as the next thing she knew the alarm clock was ringing in her ear. One minute to nine. It was time.

Rosalind yawned, standing up neatly and moving to the switch on the side of the Lutece Tear. Her fingers curled around it, eyes trained on the clock. Her nervousness was mounting with each tick; she could feel the lump in her throat and the thudding of her heart as she prepared for the eventual moment of truth. Most likely, this was going to fail again. After all, experience would suggest it. The experiment would provide no results, just as it had before, and she would be left hanging on the edge of the scientific discovery of the century. It was frustrating, to say the least.

Sighing slightly, she diverted her attention back to the clock. There was no point dwelling on that now, not while there was science to be done.

Time seemed to slow as the seconds ticked down. She could feel the machine buzzing under her fingertips, smell the oil in the air from the repairs and revisions she had made the day before. The anticipation was almost too much to bear. Her grip tightened on the lever as she watched the second hand on the clock sweep towards the top until, finally, the moment was upon her. Eyes squeezed shut, she threw the switch.

A small burst of air puffed against her face. The buzzing heightened, until it throbbed at the back of her mind like a swarm of angry hornets. And yet, above the noise, she could still hear a small, absurdly polite cough. Opening her eyes, she peered into the archway.

Floating there was a circular window in reality, a greyscale gap in the fabric of space that hovered at head height before her. The image it displayed was almost an inverted version of her own lab. There were some small changes – a toppled chair, peeling wallpaper, a sparking machine – but it was still mostly recognisable as the same space. That, however, was not what Rosalind was staring at.

Standing in front of her was herself. Or rather, herself if she had been born a man.

He was the spitting image of her, barring the obvious difference of their sex. His presumably copper-coloured hair was parted in a masculine imitation of her own, he wore the same jacket and vest as she did, and he stood with his arms behind his back in an exact mirror of her own. She even noted, to her own personal amusement, that his jacket was torn in the exact same place as hers, and the oil stains on his shirt were identical to the stains on her own shirt.

Even his face was the same as hers. The glassy eyes, the freckled complexion – even his aloof expression and slight smile that curled his lips matched her own visage. They could almost have been twins. As she watched him, she could see his own eyes flicking over her and around the room, doubtless coming to the same conclusions that she was.

Finally, she could stand the silence no longer. With what she hoped was a winning smile, she stuck her hand through the Tear in greeting.

“Hello, Mister Lutece.” she said, meeting his eyes for the first time. He smiled back at her, grasping her hand firmly and shaking it. Briefly, she glanced down at their clasped hands, frowning slightly with a scientific curiosity. Where her hand passed through the Tear, it seemed to morph into the same greyscale tone as Robert’s world – and where his hand extended into her world, it gained full colour, the sleeve of his jacket turning the same light brown as her own and his skin becoming a familiar, freckled peach.

“I think ‘Robert’ is sufficient under the circumstances, don’t you?” he replied, raising an eyebrow. “Especially given that this is hardly our first meeting.” He released her hand, clasping it behind his back with the other.

“True,” she conceded, “But seeing as we were never afforded the luxury of a formal introduction I thought I’d make do.” He chuckled, and she smiled back at him, feeling her former nervousness dissipate in his relaxed presence.

“Yes,” Robert said, smirking smugly at her. “Our meeting was hardly a conventional occurrence. But that is beside the point.”

“Indeed!” She was beaming again, which she mentally chided herself for. _Honestly, Rosalind,_ she thought to herself, _one experiment proves to be a success and you turn into a giggling schoolgirl again._ “After all, we are being rather blasé about the revolutionary scientific discovery that has just taken place.”

“Really? All I see is a large heap of hastily welded scrap metal,” he said,  raising an eyebrow wryly.

She rolled her eyes at him. “That ‘large heap of hastily welded scrap metal’ just punched a hole through our universes, a feat which has never been performed before in the history of _mankind_ , and you know what I meant.”

His eyes flashed with barely-concealed amusement. “Narcissist,” he said. accusationally.

“You can talk,” she retorted, the smile beginning to creep back onto her lips.

“So I can,” he chuckled. “Apologies, my dear Rosalind. Please continue.”

She scowled playfully, folding her arms with a deep mock-sigh. “The bottom line is this; the machine works. We have successfully connected our separate universes.”

“To what end?” Robert inquired, and she had to admit that he had a point there. The practicality of their Lutece Tear was a question that had bothered her – all this work for no gain? But she was sure that they could come up with something.

“Oh, there shall probably be some sort of practical application somewhere down the line,” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “I shall mention it to my employer, he may be mildly interested. Plus, he deserves an explanation as to where his funding has been going these last few months.”

She stopped short, hearing a sudden noise. Behind her, the door clicked open to reveal Wright, his dark hair tousled and a confused expression on his face. “Madame Lutece? Who’re you talkin’ to-oh. Huh.”

Turning to face the unfortunate young man, Rosalind smiled thinly. “That, Wright, is rather an understatement,” she said, as Robert chuckled quietly behind her. “Kindly go back to your own work, won’t you?”

“Y-yes, ma’am!” he said, bolting from the room as though he was being chased by a particularly hungry predator. No sooner had the door slammed shut, than both Luteces burst out into hysterical laughter.

“Who was that?” Robert asked, grinning between fits of mirth.

“One of the lab assistants,” she sighed. “Inept, the lot of them, but they do the manual work that I don’t want to.”

“I see,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “I wish I was afforded that luxury.” Something about the low, slightly bitter tone of his voice sparked her curiosity.

“You work alone?”

“I have to. My funding, alas, does not stretch very far. I could barely afford to make this thing,” he said, slapping the side of his Lutece Tear.

Rosalind frowned. That was another difference, then. Their speculations on the nature of their different realities had yielded some interesting hypotheses, but no solid theories. Any differences that they had noticed were the strangest things, distinct but usually miniscule. She bit a lip in thought. “I could try and arrange something...” she offered, rapidly trying to think of a quick solution, but none were presenting themselves to her.

He just shrugged. “That is a concern for the future. For now, I feel that celebration is in order!”

“Indeed!” Reaching behind one of the desks, she brought out a bottle of champagne and a pair of glasses. “Here. Just a little something that I’ve been saving. To our success.”

“To success!” he echoed, accepting the glass that she proffered through the Tear, and they drank with indistinguishable smiles. This was certainly going to prove to be a profitable partnership.


	3. Walls Between Worlds

**CHAPTER THREE – WALLS BETWEEN WORLDS**

_This business is getting more and more difficult by the day. Comstock has been haranguing me for weeks about his child situation. I asked him what exactly he wanted me to do, he’s sterile and I’m no biologist. He told me he had to have a child. I asked if he’d considered adopting, but he brushed it off. Apparently, he thinks that the child has to be his. Then he just stopped talking, broke out into this incredibly uncharacteristic smile and said that he had an idea. It’s the most ridiculously convoluted thing that I have ever heard. And yet, we’re going to do it.  
\- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 4 th of October 1893_

The morning of the eighth of October dawned a crisp but pleasant autumn day. Rosalind was walking to the lab, as she usually did, her hands stuffed moodily into the pockets of her jacket, grumpily bemoaning every golden leaf that whipped past her head in the wind. On any other day, going into the lab would be what made the day interesting, but that day? Not so much.

It had all begun a few weeks after she and Robert had first met face-to-face. Her employer, the self-proclaimed prophet Comstock, had come into the labs to discuss the progress of the Columbia project. This, ordinarily, would not have been a issue. However, the Luteces were having a few problems with the prototype for the Lutece Tear. It worked well enough, now that they had gotten it up and running. That was not the issue. The issue was that containing the tears was proving more troublesome than they had anticipated.

Robert had no real problem with it. He had no colleagues, nobody who could tell the world his secret. Rosalind, however, had to deal with the tears popping up everywhere throughout the labs. The odd thing was, not one of them seemed to show Robert’s universe. They all reflected different things; a world where the lab was made of different materials, one where the lab hadn’t been built and was a book shop instead, even one where the entire city didn’t exist and dinosaurs walked the earth.

The tears didn’t always show the area they were in, either. Sometimes, when Rosalind looked into them, she saw other cities and countries – Paris, Amsterdam, Cairo, Tokyo, even her native London – but never quite as she knew them. The differences may have been subtle, but they were always there, and quite fascinating to observe. Now that the Columbia project was almost complete, she had even put a couple of the assistants to work watching the smaller tears, just to see what they could make of them.

That particular morning, a tear had opened on her desk that appeared to lead to the end of the world, or something that looked very much like it. Rosalind wasn’t paying it much attention. She had learned to ignore the floating aberrances in time and space, working around them as though they were no more of an inconvenience than the stray insects that often found their way into the lab.

She was sitting at her desk, calmly scribbling down various calculations and measurements, when her office door swung open. Standing in the doorframe was a young man in an immaculate black suit, dark brown hair parted in the fashion of the upper class, and wearing an astonished expression on his face. He was staring directly into the tear on her desk, his face chalk-white. Rosalind swore under her breath.

“Mister Comstock!” she exclaimed, standing up hastily to block his view of the tear. “You’re here early.” It sounded almost like an accusation.

He stared at her, gobsmacked, before his eyes slipped back to the rippling tear behind her back. “It seems, Madame Lutece, that I am just in time. What in God’s creation _is_ that thing?” His voice was authoritative but hoarse, carrying a note of strained incredulity.

She sighed. “That is incredibly difficult to explain,” Deciding that there was no point in trying to hide the elephant in the room, she sat back down at her desk, pulling across another chair with the toe of her boot. “Would you care to take a seat?”

With a look of suspicion, her employer sat opposite her, as she filled him in on the details of what she had been getting up to behind his back, and how she met her counterpart from another reality. This caused a few very undignified expletives from Comstock’s corner, and some rolled eyes and a brief explanation of quantum physics from Rosalind’s. But throughout the whole explanation Comstock’s eyes kept going back to the tear. Clearly, he was fascinated by its very existence. She groaned internally. This was not going to end well.

Eventually, once her explanation had finished, her employer stood up and peered into the tear in front of them, a look of deep concentration on his young face. Rosalind stood behind him, taking the opportunity to glare at his back with barely-concealed contempt. Light from the tear flickered over their faces. Inside it, another city had begun to burn. Comstock was transfixed – Rosalind had never seen him concentrate so hard on something she had done.

“So these...‘tears’,” he began, hesitantly. “They show the future?”

“Not really,” she replied, silently cursing the fact that he hadn’t listened to a word she’d said. “More like probability. I have talked it over with my...colleague. They seem to show what _might_ be, not what will-”

He held up a hand, silencing her. She fumed behind his back, but unfortunately her attempts to set him on fire through sheer force of willpower proved unsuccessful. They stood there for a few uncomfortable moments, Comstock pondering and Lutece glaring, until finally the Prophet turned around and smiled at Rosalind unnervingly.

“Yes, these will prove to be quite useful.”

Since then, Comstock had been to the lab almost every day, observing the various tears that appeared sporadically through the lab. This, of course, was a major annoyance to Rosalind’s, but her hands were tied. He was funding her experiments, after all, and could stop her funding if she so much as spoke out of turn. Besides, she had plans for a more portable version of the Lutece Tear that she could set up somewhere else, stopping him from taking up space in her lab.

Months had passed, and the Columbian World’s Fair happened. Columbia was finished, and proudly displayed to the American people. Most of the people who had worked on the Columbia project were living there now, including Rosalind and her team. She had her own personal lab now, and so long as she fulfilled her work for Comstock she was essentially free to do as she wished, which suited her nicely.

There was only one real problem, and his name was Comstock.

He was married now, and his wife seemed not to care for her. Lady Comstock was agreeable enough (despite the whispered rumours regarding her past), but she seemed to dislike Rosalind on principle, probably because the scientist was spending so much time with her husband. Rosalind thought the whole thing was ridiculous, especially considering the fact that her feelings towards Comstock fluctuated between strained tolerance and outright loathing, but she could deal with her. That wasn’t the problem.

The problem was that Comstock wanted a child.

Her employer was spending most of his time looking through the tears. Apparently, it helped him to ‘prophesy’. She had tried to explain to him that the events seen in the tears were more probabilities than actualities, but he refused to listen. All the tear-gazing seemed to have a negative effect on him – she had noticed that the young man looked to be much older than his nineteen years, even growing a rather impressive beard in an impossibly short time.

Furthermore, from the evidence, the adverse effect appeared to have rendered Comstock sterile. That was another thing he was refusing to listen to her about. He never wanted to believe her when she told him, instead ranting at her again and again to somehow produce him a child. How, exactly, was never clear. The man was as delusional as he was irritating, but he was in charge, and she still had to listen to him.

Until that day. The eighth of October, 1893. The day they were going to enact their plan. Or, more accurately enact Comstock’s plan that she had been press-ganged into complying with. She groaned aloud as she reached the door of her lab, hesitating before her hand brushed the polished wood of the door. In the glass, she could see Comstock’s shadow, pacing impatiently to and fro. Burying her face in her hands, Rosalind attempted to compose herself.

If she was honest, however, she had been looking forward to this day for weeks. Not because of Comstock’s moronic plan, but because of her counterpart. She and Robert had been working on a modified version of the Lutece Tear, one that generated larger tears that they could walk through, crossing the boundaries of reality. That day, they were finally putting the Lutece Tear 3.0 into action, and Robert was going to step through a tear and join her in her universe.

They had already planned how he could to fit into her life; she had decided to introduce him as a previously-unmentioned twin brother, which seemed to be the most plausible explanation for his sudden presence. They had even begun to practice referring to each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, as it sounded more familiar.

Straightening her jacket slightly, Rosalind pushed the door open, smiling the most forced of smiles at Comstock. His expression did not change as he followed her down the dark, musty hallway to where the Lutece Tear was situated.

“Everything is in order?” he asked primly, giving her a stern glance, and she resisted the urge to make a snappy remark. Although she had to admit, Comstock was becoming more and more of an imposing presence these days. It was no small wonder that he had convinced a significant number of people to come to Columbia, enough to make the place an actual, working city, in fact. She might have even admired him for that if he wasn’t so irritating otherwise.

“Certainly, Mister Comstock,” she replied, twisting her hands together behind her back. “My brother contacted this ‘DeWitt’. As soon as I open the window he will obtain the child.”

He nodded, in an almost imperceptible motion. “I wish to go with him,” he said, still avoiding her gaze. Rosalind groaned inaudibly. Great. His interference might just ruin the entire experiment! If he wasn’t her employer, she’d be telling him where to go and stick his floating city.

“That might not be exactly wise,” she said, carefully resisting the urge to slam his head against the wall. “Our Tear technology is still volatile, the risks are-”

“I am _going_ to go with him, Madame Lutece, whether you agree or not,” Comstock replied, tuning to stare her down. Rosalind bit her lip angrily.

“Very well. On your own head be it.” She flicked a hand at him, motioning him out of the way. “But don’t blame _us_ if you get trapped in there,” she added quickly, pulling the switch.

The Lutece Tear buzzed into action. This machine was slightly smaller and a lot more professional-looking, situated in the middle of the room rather than squashed into a corner as it was in her old lab. Its dull metal sparked and whirred as power ran through the large cables, opening a shimmering tear in the wall in front of them.

Standing in the tear, his arms behind his back and his usual aloof expression on his face, was Robert Lutece, looking somewhat run down. He appeared to be standing in some sort of grotty back alley, the faded brickwork behind him rife with moss and dirt.

“Good morning!” he greeted them cheerily. “I presume this is Mister Comstock?”

Comstock inclined his head. “The one and same.”

“A pleasure to finally meet you, sir. Are we ready to proceed?” This last was directed at Rosalind, who had moved from the machine to stand before the tear. Smiling at Robert, she nodded decisively.

“As soon as you are, anyway. Oh, and you are to be accompanied by Mister Comstock. He’s insisting.” She gave him a meaningful look, hoping he, of all people, would understand her frustration. A look of irritation flitted across her counterpart’s face, but he still gave Comstock a polite, if forced smile.

“Very well.  As long as you are aware of the risks-”

“I am well aware of all of the dangers of your little machine.” Comstock interrupted. “I wish to see my daughter. And I care not, Mister Lutece, for disagreeable people.”

It was a threat, and not a very well-veiled one. Sharing an exasperated look with Rosalind, Robert gestured to Comstock.

“Come through, then. We haven’t much time.”

Comstock only hesitated for a second before stepping through the tear. As his foot connected with the gap between worlds, the tear seemed to ripple, fluctuating and undulating around it. He paused again, frowning at the outstretched limb, before stepping completely through.

Rosalind watched him go, fascinated. This was the first time that an actual person had attempted to go through one of the new tears. They had done experiments before with small objects and mice, but they had never tested them with a person. She watched as he seemed to melt into the tear, brown suit becoming monochrome as he passed into Robert’s world.

She smiled to herself. It worked! A living person, passing between realities. They had had some trouble with the experiments; the things they used sometimes got stuck or lost parts as they crossed over. But there he was, still alive and whole. Through the tear, Robert flashed her a quick grin to let her know that he was thinking the same thing. She broadened her smile, before rolling her eyes at Comstock’s retreating back. He raised both eyebrows in mocking solidarity, then stepped forwards to greet Comstock.

“This way, sir,” he said, before turning briefly back to Rosalind. “We shouldn’t be long, everything’s set up with DeWitt. We’ll be back shortly, sister.”

And with that, the pair of them walked out of sight, past the edge of the tear. Rosalind folded her arms with a wry smile, glancing back towards the Tear machine and hoping that everything went as smoothly as he made it sound. She had a feeling that things were not exactly going to go to plan.

Comstock’s idea, as he had explained it to her a few days ago, was insane enough as a concept. He wanted them to travel across realities, find this ‘DeWitt’ person, see if they had a child and if so, take the child from him in exchange for whatever he wanted. Money, he had told her, was no problem so long as he ended up with the child. So Robert had made inquiries, and it turned out that DeWitt was everything Comstock said, and more. A gambling addict, apparently. How he knew that this man would be there and have a young enough child was something Rosalind had never worked out.

It mystified her, frankly, that they were going to such elaborate lengths in order to fulfil the man’s bizarre urge to be a parent. The only reason she had agreed to it was because it meant he’d finally have to fund the Lutece Tear, something she had been badgering him about for months. If it weren’t for that single aspect, she would have probably refused on principle to punch a hole in the universe just so he could kidnap one very specific child. Well, that and the fact that she still technically worked for him.

She considered it even worse, however, that Comstock’s newfound want for parenthood did not seem to come from an actual desire to be a parent. Rosalind had caught the so-called Prophet one day staring into a tear that seemed to show Columbia, muttering something about the ‘Seed of the Prophet’ to himself over and over again. When she had asked him what the matter was, the man had brushed her off and ushered her out of the room. He was still there when she returned, hours later, scrutinising the tear with a look of rabid concentration. It was that sort of thing that was going to be the death of him, she thought, not that he seemed to care

Biting her lip absently, Rosalind looked down at her watch. They didn’t have long to collect the child. From their past experiences, the tears tended to close after a few moments, and getting them to stabilise long enough to pass something through was incredibly tricky. Already, the tear in front of her was beginning to fluctuate, growing and shrinking until even thinking about going through it would be hazardous.

She went back to the machine behind her, inattentively pressing a few buttons on the console. The buzzing sound of the machine deepened and, behind her, the tear widened slightly. It was still fluctuating, but at a level where she could still see through it – and, hopefully, that they could get back through it.

A noise behind her made her turn back. It was Robert, and behind him was Comstock, carrying DeWitt’s child in his arms. The girl was silent but awake, wrapped in a powder-blue blanket and staring confusedly at her new surroundings. He held her awkwardly, as though he had never carried a child before.

Rosalind smiled, stepping forwards to greet them, but she stopped short when she saw Robert. Her brother’s look as he gazed through the tear was unusually pensive. He seemed reluctant to step through.

“That doesn’t look safe,” he remarked, looking up at the wall surrounding the tear. She frowned at him. After all this preparation, there was no way she would let him back out now.

“It’s about as safe as it was when _he_ went through,” she said, indicating Comstock. “And he got through fine! Now come on!”

Robert seemed unconvinced, rubbing the back of his neck contemplatively. “Are you sure? It could do with a bit more stability!”

“Alright. But once I’ve stabilised it, will you get a move on?”

“I’m not sure I want to!” he said forcefully, his voice strained. “It’s looking rather unstable!” She was about to argue, but they were interrupted by a burst of noise from the other side of the alley.

A young man she did not recognise came tearing around the corner. He looked a state. His clothes were old and dirty, hair matted and eyes red-rimmed, and even from where she stood she could smell alcohol on him. The man lurched over to Comstock, thrusting his hands around the startled man’s shoulders and yelling something incoherent at him.

Tearing her eyes away from the scuffle, Rosalind made a desperate plea to her brother. “It’s fine, hurry!” she said, holding her hand out for him. He took another step back, shaking his head with a look of alarm.

“Fine? Are you _mad?_ ”

She glared at him angrily, going back to the machine and making a few adjustments. Behind her, Comstock and the man that she assumed was DeWitt continued to fight, Comstock refusing to let go of the child and DeWitt refusing to be dissuaded. Heart racing, she punched a few more buttons on the machine, hoping that was enough to stabilise it.

As she glanced back, she saw to her relief that the tear had widened, stabilising at the just the right width. “It’s ready! Go!” she shouted, rushing forwards and grabbing Robert’s arm, pulling him through despite his protestations. Comstock, finally shrugging off DeWitt, made to follow, but as he did DeWitt grabbed the child, tugging her towards him.

“Shut down the machine! Shut it down now!” the Prophet yelled, frantically pulling the child back to him. She turned to comply, just as DeWitt lost his grip on the girl. She anxiously held out her tiny hand to him, but to no avail – Rosalind slammed down the switch, and everything seemed to happen in slow motion.

DeWitt shouted. The machine whirred. The tear closed. The child wailed. Her brother collapsed.

“Robert?” she said hesitantly, approaching her brother as he lay prone on the floor. He groaned incoherently in response. She knelt down beside him, examining him for any external injuries, but she couldn’t see any damage.

In the other corner of the lab, Comstock was having issues with his newfound daughter. “Stop _crying_!” he muttered, exasperatedly holding her up in front of him. Standing up, Rosalind went over to him, only to see that the girl was bleeding. She took a handkerchief from her jacket pocket, and wrapped it around the girl’s little finger.

“Here,” she said, inspecting the wound. The top of her little finger appeared to have been cut off; a side effect of the portal’s closing, no doubt. “You might want to cover that up, in future.”

“Thank you, Madame Lutece,” Comstock said, stiffly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I shall be taking my daughter home.” She gave him a small nod, and the Prophet strode out of the room, carrying the still-wailing baby with him. Rosalind didn’t bother to watch him go. Let the old fool do whatever he wanted. She crossed the room again, returning to sit at her brother’s side and placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

“Are you alright?” she asked, her face a mask of concern.

“Perfectly. Well, as far as I can recall,” His speech was slurred and sluggish, and he winced as he pushed himself off the floor. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“Not well. Were we doing some sort of experiment?” He frowned, putting a hand to his forehead.

“Robert,” she said seriously, looking him straight in the eye. “Do you remember where you came from?”

“I-” He squeezed his eyes tight shut, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Argh. My head, I... ” A trickle of blood ran down from his left nostril, stopping just short of his top lip. He put a finger to it, staring at the red stain with utter bewilderment. Finally, he looked back to Rosalind. “I was here the whole time, wasn’t I?”

“No. You only just arrived.” Rosalind frowned again. Robert seemed to be suffering some sort of confusion, likely a result of the travel between universes. But if that was the case, then why did he seem otherwise well? There were no physical signs of him being affected by the travel. She examined him again, looking him over with a practiced eye, but to no avail.

“That’s confusing,” he mumbled, pinching his bleeding nose with one hand. “I don’t remember going anywhere...”

Rosalind sighed, straightening up. “Not to worry, brother,” she said, smiling reassuringly to mask the anxiety that twisted her stomach into a knot. “You’re here now. The rest we can sort out, in time.” She just hoped that was true.


	4. A Murder Of Crows

**CHAPTER FOUR – A MURDER OF CROWS**

_Lady Comstock appears to have suffered an unfortunate accident. And by that, I mean she was murdered. Comstock’s covering it up with some tall tale about his housekeeper strangling her out of spite. People are buying it. They have no reason not to, I suppose. Doesn’t make it any less wrong. At least now, she’s out of our labs and out of our hair. I was getting tired of being accused of impropriety every time I dared to step outside of the labs.  
\- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 6 th of January 1895_

The months after Robert’s crossing were turbulent, to say the least. Rosalind would have called it a fascinating social study, were it not for the fact that her brother was the one being studied.

It wasn’t that he was delusional, although in her more cynical moods she might have made that very claim. He just seemed to believe the story they had fabricated about him being her twin. And every time she managed to convince him that was not the case, he suffered nosebleeds and haemorrhaging so severe that she would effectively have to start over again the next time they talked.

The situation was frustrating, to say the least, but Rosalind didn’t mind the annoyances. She could imagine that it was a lot worse to be in Robert’s shoes. Her brother could barely even assist her in the most basic of scientific exploits without triggering some hitherto unforeseen gap in his memory, resulting in him bleeding all over his notes or getting crippling headaches. The worst incident, however, occurred a few weeks after Robert had entered her universe, in early November.

It had started when Robert had gone missing. That, in itself, was not an uncommon – he had been known to forget where he was and wander off down the wrong streets, getting hopelessly lost and forcing her to come out and get him. It didn’t help that he wasn’t as intrinsically familiar with the layout of Columbia as Rosalind was. He often stayed out for a while, wandering through Columbia disoriented and confused, until Rosalind could locate him and bring him back. It wasn’t his fault, of course. He couldn’t be blamed for the bouts of confusion that the universe-hopping seemed to entail.

But that day, it was getting late, and Rosalind had not been able to find her brother anywhere. She had left the lab to search for him at about six in the evening; it was now going on nine, and she still hadn’t seen hide or hair of him. She had traipsed through Emporia a few times, looking in every shop and down every back alley; she had been to the everywhere she could think of through Soldier’s Field, even as far out as Finkton, but with no luck. Her brother was simply nowhere to be found.

By five to nine, she had ended up back at the Garden of New Eden, feet aching from the exertion. It was then that she had decided to give up and see if her brother had made it back to the labs under his own steam.

When she got back to Emporia and walked through the door of her lab, the second thing she noticed was the bloodstains, spattered neatly on the smooth white tile of the floor. The first, of course, was the slumped form of Robert, sitting with his back against the wall with his eyes shut, a red-stained handkerchief clamped to his nose. His jacket, which was also mildly spotted with blood, had been thrown clumsily over a chair near the entrance, and he had knocked over the desk with his stumbling around, sending stray papers and errant books flying everywhere.

With a soft smile, Rosalind crossed the room to sit next to him. As she lowered herself to the floor, he opened his eyes, looking sideways at her. Cocking her head to one side, she took out her own handkerchief, passing it to him to replace his stained one. “Here,” she said, quietly. “Did you forget where you were again?”

He grunted, accepting the handkerchief. “Don’t even know what happened this time. I was out walking near the Memorial Gardens, then another wave of dizziness and I’m suddenly wandering over by that statue of you.” His voice was low and hollow, almost uncharacteristically so. She sighed.

“More dissonance, then?”

“Indeed.” He winced suddenly, his face contorting in pain.

“Are you alright?” she said immediately, turning to face him properly. He gave her an odd look, frowning at her thoughtfully.

“I think, dear sister,” he began, hesitantly. “That you are proving to be part of the problem.”

She bristled. “What do you mean?” He hadn’t sounded accusatory, but there was something bitter in his voice that set her on edge.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said, waving his free hand dismissively. “But when you talk sometimes, it’s...it’s like I can hear it, echoing inside my head.” He gestured to his brain with another suppressed wince. “As though it’s me talking, not you.”

“Understandable. We _are_ the same person.”

“Don’t I know it,” he mumbled sardonically, resting his head in his free hand. Her face fell slightly, and he gave her a wry smile. “I didn’t mean it like _that,_ Rosalind, and you know it.”

Wordlessly, she stood up, going over to the basin on the other side of the room. Grabbing a nearby scrap of cloth, she ran it under the tap, before sitting back opposite Robert and holding it out to him

Feebly, Robert tried to bat her hand away. “Oh, stop that,” he snapped.

She smiled smugly, holding his free hand out of her way. “You need to stop bleeding, brother,” she explained, holding the cloth over the bridge of his nose. “This is the quickest way to constrict your blood vessels.”

“Be that as it may, I will not have you fussing over me like this,” he complained. Ignoring him, she used an edge of the cloth to mop up some of the blood that had spread over his face. “Hey!” he said indignantly. She suppressed a smirk. Robert may have been acting like a child, but at least he was acting like himself again. Even if that self was currently comprised of whining and moping.

“You’re not my mother, you know,” he sulked, as she carefully cleaned the last speck of blood from his face. This time, she did smile.

“Well, at least you remember that much,” she said lightly, still holding the damp cloth to his face. He tried once again to bat her arm away, but she held it tightly away from him. Carefully, she peeled the cloth from his face, and he lowered the handkerchief. “There. The bleeding’s stopped,” she said triumphantly.

Robert merely sighed, pushing himself to his feet again. “Good.”

“No ‘thank you’?” She stood up, folding her arms in mock-annoyance. Robert rolled his eyes, but the grin that had begun to creep across his face betrayed him.

“Not if you’re going to be that smug about it,” he retorted anyway. Briskly, he strode to the other side of the room, picking up his jacket and grimacing at the bloodstains.

Rosalind watched him go, her own expression a mix of concern and amusement. “I can hardly help it, brother,” she said. “Smugness is rather our forte."  He gave her a look, but even then his face cracked into a smile and he chuckled, looking her in the eye for the first time since she had returned to the lab. She grinned back, secure in the knowledge that at least for now, her brother was back to normal.

Since that day, Robert’s dissonant episodes had become fewer and fewer. There were still bad moments, of course. They couldn’t be expected to disappear overnight. On one memorable occasion, Rosalind had come downstairs from the rooms they shared above the lab to find her brother wearing one of her corsets and a confused expression. She had gently guided him back up the stairs, reminding for the thousandth time of who he was and where he was.

They had worked out, Rosalind by observation and Robert by experience, that the main cause of the dissonance was the difference between their realities. The fact was that they were two copies of the same person, vying for space in one singular world. Robert even said that he had managed to form new memories from his old experiences and what he knew of her universe; which, all things considered, explained why he often thought he was her actual sibling, or confused his identity with hers. When his false memories clashed with reality, there was dissonance and bleeding.

The best solution that they had found was to firmly instil in him his real identity, helping him solidify the true memories and stop him believing in the false ones. It took weeks of careful study to achieve properly. But, slowly and surely, they worked towards it.

Most of the dissonance didn’t take long to disappear. Both of the Lutece siblings worked hard to ensure that. After another week Robert had stopped getting nosebleeds as frequently, even if his headaches persisted. He was able to leave the labs normally, conduct his own experiments and help Rosalind wherever she needed without any real interference. And all the while, she was standing on the sidelines and cheering him on. It was good to see him being cheerful again.

The first day that he managed to take a walk alone and return without issue, she couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the day. She was relentlessly teased for it, of course, but she knew that her brother didn’t take any real issue with her. Secretly, she had picked up on his pride at overcoming that obstacle; a furtive smile, a spring in his step, a triumphal tone to his voice. The truth was that they were both ecstatic, even if they preferred not to show it.

However, the curiously lasting echo effect was still a cause for concern in her eyes. Robert was hearing her voice in his head, seeing the world through her eyes – that wasn’t an effect left over from the crossing, it was an effect of him being in this universe alongside her. Oddly enough, it hadn’t really subsided along with his other symptoms, leaving Robert to find other ways of ignoring it or blocking it out somehow.

“It gives me a headache,” he remarked, one day. “But it’s a small price, really. Especially as that’s really the only side-effect.”

“I’d consider it preferable to bleeding all over my equipment.”

“And I would consider it preferable if your equipment actually _worked_ , my dear sister, but one cannot always have what one wants.”

The days and weeks went by. Life settled into a routine, more or less. Columbia was a peaceful city, and they had found their place within it. Specifically, that place appeared more and more to be the almost-complete Monument Tower.

Another curiosity had arisen. One day, almost exactly a year since she had come into their world, Comstock awoke to find that his child, who he had named Elizabeth, was not in her crib. He had begun to panic, waking his wife and turning the entire room upside down searching for her, when he heard the distinctive sound of a tear opening behind him. He turned to find the girl sitting on his bed, giggling and playing with a small teddy bear as though nothing had happened. Later, when he called Rosalind in to examine the child, she had affirmed what the Prophet suspected – the child could open tears on her own.

For Lady Comstock, that was the last straw. She was the only one in Columbia who knew that the girl was no divine being; the only one besides her husband and the Luteces, that is. However, Comstock had not seen it wise to tell his wife the truth, instead making up some nonsense about God’s will.

Rosalind knew that she would never fall for it. Despite the woman’s past as a disciple of Comstock, she was no fool. Instead, she assumed that the girl was Rosalind’s, possibly because of the time her husband had spent in Rosalind’s presence and the fact that she had appeared out of nowhere. It was a logical conclusion to leap to, Rosalind would later remark, if a completely incorrect one.

But if the child being apparently illegitimate was bad for mundane reasons, the child being endowed with powers was a whole new level of wrong. The day after her abilities were discovered, Lady Comstock demanded that the child should be taken out of their home and her sight immediately. Comstock argued, but after he saw his wife’s determination and realised his own newfound uncertainty of his child, he relented. The girl was to be put in Monument Tower as soon as it was built, and Robert and Rosalind agreed to observe her progress as she grew up.

This did not stop Lady Comstock.

The woman might have been pleasant to everybody else, but Rosalind found her to be quite a disagreeable person. Mostly because she would insist on visiting Rosalind at the labs to scream accusations at her. Accusations that, by order of Comstock, she could not accurately dispute, leaving her with nothing more than flimsy excuses that seemed to only deepen Lady Comstock’s suspicions of her.

Robert seemed to find the whole affair amusing. Rosalind did not. It was annoying enough when the woman merely hated her from a distance, but such public accusations were proving to be quite troublesome. It could not go on forever, Rosalind rationalised as she went about her business. They were at a tipping point – sooner or later, something had to give. And finally, early in January of the next year, something did.

It started out as a fairly normal day. Rosalind had come down from the rooms that they shared above the lab, and begun work on the large Lutece Tear that they were kept in the middle of what would have been the living room. Robert, meanwhile, had gone out to fetch some groceries shortly beforehand. The pair were attempting to stabilise the machine, so that tears would appear less frequently in random locations across Columbia. It was slow, tedious work, but that would soon change.

The girl was nearly three years old, and the inner structure of Monument Island had been completed. That meant they could start work in the lab there soon, observing the girl and her growth. Elizabeth had been there for a few months, under the watchful eye of a few of Comstock’s servants, but the scientists couldn’t begin to observe her properly until the tower’s lab was completed and all of their equipment was moved in. Until then, there was not a lot that Rosalind and Robert could really do.

After about an hour of tinkering with the machine’s workings Rosalind sat down on a couch in front of the fire. Trying to contain the tears was proving increasingly futile, especially as she suspected that their machine was not the sole reason they were appearing so frequently. She could afford to spend some time relaxing with a copy of _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea_ before Robert came back.

Another half an hour passed before he returned, two paper bags full of groceries filling his arms as he stumbled in. She neatly marked her page in the book, hiding a smirk at his encumbered state. Robert, however, did not seem in the mood for frivolities. His face was drawn; he was nearly frowning, and bit a corner of his lip in a thoughtful manner, as she had seen him doing so many times before while he worked. Her first thought was that he’d had some sort of dissonance issue again, but she dismissed it offhand. Robert had almost stopped having severe episodes now, and he wasn’t even bleeding. Whatever he was concerned about, it was something new.

“Have you heard the news?” Robert asked, cutting into her thoughts. She rolled her eyes at him from the couch, placing her book on the end table next to her.

“Does it look as though I’ve left the building today?” Her tone was sarcastic as ever, but Robert still did not appear to be in the mood for joking. Instead, he handed her a newspaper, dropping the groceries on a nearby desk.

“Lady Comstock,” he announced in a grandiose tone. “Is dead.”

“Dead?” she said slowly, scanning the front page of the newspaper. “Had an ‘accident’, I suppose.” She blinked at the newspaper, her mind reeling. Whatever she had been expecting, that certainly was not it.

However, it wasn’t an unlikely turn of events. Lady Comstock had seemed to up her game over the last week or so, appearing at the labs almost every day in an attempt to get the truth out of Rosalind. In a fit of exasperation, she had told her everything, but the woman didn’t believe her. Obviously. Lady Comstock was not known for her understanding of quantum physics. Nonetheless, she appeared to want to take it up with her husband – and Comstock never reacted well to people who questioned his authority. Doubtless he had seen fit to get rid of his errant wife, and cover it up somehow.

Robert raised an eyebrow. “No, actually. That’s the surprising thing.”

“Then how?”

“Murder.”

“Murder?” she repeated incredulously, sitting up from the couch. “Is Comstock actually admitting-?”

“Not by Comstock,” he said, holding up a finger to silence her. “By one Daisy Fitzroy.” He pointed out the relevant passage in the newspaper, carefully observing her to gauge her reaction. Rosalind’s mind was working overtime, frantically digesting this new information, but she didn’t let it show. Instead, she frowned, not recognising the name of Lady Comstock’s ‘murderer’.

“Who?”

“Their housekeeper.”

“Ah. A scapegoat, then.”

Robert nodded, wandering over to join her on the couch. He slumped beside her, glancing at the newspaper over her shoulder. “She seems to have gone into hiding,” he remarked offhandedly. “Can’t say I blame her.” He glanced at Rosalind, who pursed her lips, still deep in thought.

“Hmm,” she said. “And I presume he’s making Lady Comstock into some sort of martyr.”

“Obviously. Her death is far too useful for them not to use as propaganda. They’re holding the memorial soon.”

She tossed the newspaper aside with a sigh. “Perhaps this will finally quell the rumour that the child is mine.”

He smirked at her, a hint of his more carefree self returning to his face. “Well, I assume that was the intent.” She smiled back with a mischievous gleam in her eye, glad to see him in a good mood.

“I _was_ rather getting tired of the suspicious looks. And the none-too-subtle insults.”

He paused, seemingly contemplating something. “Is that why you’ve been making me do all of the shopping?”

“I’d have thought you’d caught on to that, brother dear.” She grinned, prompting an annoyed pout from her brother. Laughing, Rosalind poked Robert in the ribs, and his grumpy expression cracked into a mildly exasperated smile. She folded her arms with a sense of triumph; Rosalind loved the smug superiority that came when she outsmarted Robert.

“To work, brother?” she asked, crossing back to the machine that dominated the room and picking up a screwdriver.

“Always a pleasure, dear sister.” He smiled wryly. “Pass the wrench, will you?”

And, surely enough, the pair were soon gathered around the Lutece Tear, trading theories and calculations across its bulk and tinkering with its various settings. Rosalind couldn’t help but feel triumphant. They were in their element, and truth be told, she didn’t really care what happened in the world around them. So long as she and Robert were together, doing what they loved, she would be content. For however long that could last.


	5. Raised Voices

**CHAPTER FIVE – RAISED VOICES**

_I would like to state for the record that I think this is a foolish endeavour from start to finish. Robert, I know you read these notes occasionally, kindly cease glaring at them. I have already agreed to go along with your plans. I just don’t like them. It’s going to end in tragedy, for everybody involved. Have you considered that returning the girl may cause her life to be considerably worse than before? We accidentally gave her power over the Tears by bringing her here initially. I’d say that was a bonus.  
\- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 16 th of October 1909_

At the end of the day, it was Elizabeth Comstock that began to drive a wedge between them. Not that she realised that she was doing it. In fact, Rosalind was relatively certain that she didn’t even know they existed. Nevertheless, she proved to be more of a problem than they had originally thought – and a super powered heir to a floating city turned battle station had never sounded like a good idea from the start.

In the fourteen years since Lady Comstock’s death, things had been mostly peaceful. Well, peaceful for the Luteces. Columbia seemed to be slowly sliding into anarchy, and Comstock was doing next to nothing about it. The Prophet was sinking further and further into his delusions regarding his daughter, and more recently a figure known as the ‘False Shepherd’. Ever since the events at the Boxer Rebellion, his elevated notion of his own supremacy had heightened to absurd proportions. He had long since replaced any idea of God in his worldview with himself; now he seemed to believe his own stories, exalting himself as a nigh-omniscient deity, even though both he and the Luteces knew that was simply the result of the tears.

Robert and Rosalind were keeping out of it. As far as they were concerned, they were there to observe the girl and make scientific progress, not get involved in the turbulent politics of Columbia. And besides, the former was far more interesting than the latter.

Monument Tower was completed the year after Lady Comstock’s death, although the girl had been living there for much longer. Around that time, the Luteces had their equipment installed in the labs under the tower and had begun observing the girl properly. It was a challenge, particularly given that the girl was fond of disappearing into tears at a moment’s notice, but it was a challenge that the Luteces were perfectly up to.

In fact, the girl’s habit of wandering through the tears had become so unsettling to Comstock that the first thing he did when the Tower was complete was order the Luteces to build something that would limit her powers. He wanted to effectively stop his daughter from ever becoming powerful enough to leave the Tower again, so she would prove less of a threat to him in future. They complied, and after a few weeks of planning and research, the first Siphon was constructed in Monument Tower.

The Siphon was meant to drain Elizabeth’s power, limiting her abilities so she could no longer travel through tears. She could open them if she tried, but going through was far too exhausting for her under the Siphon’s effects. The design was based on their ideas for controlling and regulating the tears that the machine produced, but localised so that only the girl was affected. They predicted that, as she grew older, the girl would be able to use the tears less and less until, finally, the Siphon would stop her being able to use them at all.

Rosalind thought it was a waste of her potential; Comstock saw it as a good security measure. Robert said nothing on the matter, but whenever they discussed it he grew distant, and changed the subject quickly. She got the sense that he didn’t approve, but if that was true then he was at least wise enough to say so around Comstock. The Prophet was quickly showing how much he didn’t like people who disagreed with him, and both Luteces agreed that it was better to stay on his good side than risk having his police break down their door with shotguns in the middle of the night.

Not that she thought Comstock would ever stoop to such unsubtle methods, of course. He had a knack for blaming the deaths of dissenters on accidents where he could, and claiming that the rest were the will of God. Frankly, she wasn’t sure why the populace seemed to lap up every word he said.

Robert often repeated to her that _most_ people didn’t know that Comstock got his prophetic powers through their tears, not divine inspiration. Rosalind retorted that it was no excuse for wilful ignorance, and really they should know better than to believe every little thing that came out of that quack’s mouth. The debate was effectively over when Robert reminded her with a smile that ‘that quack’ was the reason that they had the funds to meet in the first place, not to mention the fact that he was the one who was paying them.

So they stayed under the radar, and everything was stable in their little world above the clouds. The girl grew up, alone but for a giant mechanical bird that Jeremiah Fink had designed. She spent her whole time in the tower, under careful observation from Robert, Rosalind and the team that they had recruited from Columbia’s citizens. It was slow work, but rewarding. The girl was a fascinating subject.

In the main lab, Robert and Rosalind were conducting some experiments of their own. Robert had become fascinated with the mechanics of the different universes that they had seen, and was developing theory after theory about how the different universes connected.

“You see,” he said one day, as they set up a small version of the Lutece Tear in the one of the smaller rooms under Monument Tower. “It all comes back to the idea of constants and variables.”

“Is this your new theory?”

“Indeed. Observe.” He directed her attention towards a contraption of his own design – a large contraption containing several smaller versions of the Lutece Tear, with a few items inside bell jars suspended beneath. The items in question were various personal effects of the girl’s, taken from her rooms at different points during her development; a small, brown teddy bear, a leather-bound poetry journal, and a bloodstained bit of cloth. In front of the three jars were a row of levers that obviously activated the machinery. He indicated the first lever, and with a slight shrug, she pulled it.

The teddy bear was struck with electricity, wobbling and rippling inside its jar. It seemed to jump for a second, flickering between two different worlds, until finally it settled. The bear looked exactly the same, except its fur was now a bright red.

“Impressive,” she said, pursing her lips and nodding her approval to Robert. He smiled, pulling the second and third levers. Surely enough, they shook and changed as the electricity hit them, the cover of the journal changing to a vibrant blue and the blood vanishing from the cloth.

“And this is your new theory, then?” She peered into the first glass, examining the faint variations between the different iterations of the toy as she flicked between the two. “Certain things always exist; there are just subtle differences between them in the different universes.”

“Precisely!” He grinned, rubbing his hands together with glee. Coming up behind Rosalind, he pointed at the toy. “See here. In the other reality, the bear is exactly the same, just a different colour. The same is true for the journal. I have examined both versions, the colour of the cover is the only difference.”

Rosalind frowned, looking in at the journal again. “Even the writing within?” He nodded enthusiastically, and pointed to the last jar.

“Even her...er...” He flushed slightly, his voice becoming quieter as he rubbed the back of his neck with a free hand. “Menarche. It becomes clean again. Which indicates that the...er... _event_ happened slightly later in that universe.” Folding her arms, Rosalind suppressed a smirk at his obvious embarrassment. Her brother could be surprisingly squeamish at times, a fact that she had been known to exploit, if only to tease him. However, pointing out his discomfort now would make it appear as though she hadn’t been paying attention.

“Fair enough, brother, but this alone is barely proof,” she said instead. “The object being a constant is nearly a given for anybody – what child hasn’t kept a toy, or teenager a journal? As to the latter,” She smiled mockingly, prompting an exasperated look from him. “That’s an inevitable side-effect of being female, not necessarily proof of given events being constant.”

Robert, however, refused to be dissuaded. “The toy is the same in design, barring the colour, and what she’s written inside the journal does not change no matter how many times I put it through the machine. I’m right, Rosalind!” He held his hands out, gesturing wildly with an academic fervour.

She smirked, lightly patting his shoulder. “Calm down, brother. Your evidence is quite conclusive, if not _absolute_ proof.” He frowned, noting her condescending tone, and she raised an eyebrow at him, almost daring him to comment.

“A theory: you’re just jealous that I came up with it first,” he said, smugness oozing from his voice. As of to demonstrate his superiority, he struck a pose; hands on hips, chest puffed out and head tilted upwards with a self-righteous grin adorning his face. He looked so ridiculous that Rosalind had to burst out laughing.

Absurd as he was, however, she had to admit that he had a point. They had spent a lot of time puzzling over the differences in the universes – specifically, the differences between their specific realities – but had not yet managed to work out what exactly made them both different and similar. Despite current failings, they were determined no matter what

But such ambitious experiments were rare. Their work was mostly centred around observing and restraining the girl, not theorising about the multiverse. Comstock wasn’t paying them to theorise, sadly. In what spare time they had, the Luteces were working on their main Lutece Tear – now version 8.1 – in order to try and contain the tears it produced better. As they lived in the same building as the thing, the pair considered it to be rather a priority.

The machine had caused all sorts of strange things to happen to the structure of their rooms, from furniture disappearing to vital equipment changing into pot plants, and it was getting really quite irritating. One memorable morning, Rosalind had awoken to find that her bedside table had somehow changed into a small dog that was contentedly chewing on a corner of the carpet. They decided to name the dog ‘Newton’, and looked after it for a week until it vanished into thin air, much to their confusion. Robert swore blind that he had spotted Newton in the care of one of the local children who often played across from the lab, but he could never find the children in question, and Newton was never seen again.

After that, the Luteces decided that something really needed to be done about the machine, and set their minds to working out what. It was during one such bout of tinkering that they had their first proper argument; an argument that, as it turned out, was vital to the fate of the entire universe, not that they knew it at the time.

When Robert came downstairs that morning, Rosalind was already at work, her head inside the main workings of the machine and a screwdriver in her hand. She had been working for about an hour, and already her jacket lay abandoned on the back of a nearby chair, her clothes slightly spattered with oil and her hair slowly coming unpinned from its intricate style. With a sigh, she sat back on her heels, frowning at the machine.

“More malfunctions?” Robert asked, coming up to kneel behind Rosalind. She turned her head, not having heard him come in, to greet him with a smile.

“Just a bit of maintenance.” Quickly, she pointed out the faulty parts of the machine’s workings. Inside the panel was a mess of gears and wires, looping randomly around each other. One corner appeared to hold a yellow rubber duck that was jammed upside down in the back of the space. “A theory: the machine’s very nature is what causes these frequent faults.”

“The tears interfere with its workings?”

“Given what I’ve found in there...” Rosalind’s voice trailed off as she held up some of the objects piled next to her. Among them was what looked like a child’s toy, a single rose, a small umbrella – even, for some reason, a fish that Rosalind was sure was alive when she pulled it out of the machine.

Robert raised an eyebrow. “It does seem likely,” he mused, looking over the collection.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” she commented, getting to her feet and placing the screwdriver on a workbench.

“Hmm. Is there any way of making the machine immune to its own effects?”

“Not that I can think of.”

“Frustrating,” Robert scratched his head thoughtfully. “We shall have to contain the tears more accurately in future. Wouldn’t want to run the risk of anything going seriously wrong.”

He continued to kneel on the floor before the machine, looking into its inner workings pensively, but she could tell that his mind wasn’t on the job. His eyes were glazed over, and a frown was etched deep into his features as he rubbed his chin. Rosalind folded her arms. She knew that look, and she knew that he had a lot more on his mind than just the problems they were having with the Lutece Tear.

“Go on,” she said firmly, a small smile curving the corner of her mouth.

“What?” Robert asked indignantly. He made to stand up, forgetting that his head was still inside the machine and hitting it on the top of the panel. “Ow.” Rubbing it miserably, he turned to Rosalind. “What do you mean, ‘go on’?”

Rosalind gave him an exasperated look. “You’ve got something on your mind. I can tell.” He frowned at her grumpily, and she shook her head in amusement. “It’s the girl again, isn’t it?”

At the mere mention of Comstock’s child, Robert straightened up, his face hardening. Closing his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose, he turned away from her to face the window.

“We have to do _something_ for her,” he said quietly. She came up behind him, putting a hand on his shoulder to console him. Robert had been struggling with his conscience for a while over the girl. As the days and weeks had gone by, he had sunk further into self-doubt, questioning if bringing her to Comstock was the right decision, if the girl would have been better off with her drunk of a father. Personally, Rosalind didn’t see the point, but she worried about him when he got into these moods.

“Sending her back now will solve nothing,” she said softly, with an encouraging smile. Robert, however, just shrugged her off, as he had a thousand times before.

“Then send her back then! Before any of this!” he cried. Her frown deepened. Jaw clenched, she rounded on him angrily.

“And how exactly are we to do that, Robert?” she asked. Her voice was strained, and she resisted the urge to glare at him as he leaned against the window.

He had talked about this before, but he’d never seemed to have had any real plan. And no matter how many times she had debated it with him, he never seemed to have any coherent ideas. She would have dismissed the whole thing as just an idle fancy of his but for the fact that he hadn’t stopped worrying about it for months.

Robert merely scoffed. “Oh, if only we had some sort of device that could connect us to other realities...” he said, his tone dripping with sarcasm.

“Don’t be facetious. You know what I meant.” She looked him in the eye with a stern glare, and he turned his head derisively. “Even if we go back to that day, the girl is seventeen years old now! Fine time to be developing a conscience.”

He scowled, moodily stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets. “That was uncalled for.”

“But necessary. You need to give up on this childish notion that the girl needs rescuing. She seems perfectly content where she is.” Rosalind folded her arms, staring at Robert sardonically. His jaw clenched, hands balling into fists inside his pockets.

“Because she doesn’t know anything else!” he retorted, his voice echoing slightly in the empty lab. “Does she even know that she’s meant to be Comstock’s daughter?”

“That’s irrelevant, and you know it!” Rosalind was shouting too, brow furrowed and fists clenched. He took one look at her and sighed deeply, shaking his head. Almost daring him to argue back, she raised an eyebrow, but the fight seemed to have left him.

He rubbed the back of his neck, his face clouding over. “What we have done to the girl is inexcusable,” he said, in a softer voice.

“But it _has_ been done,” Her voice was quiet, but firm. She approached him again, placing a consoling hand on his shoulder. “It can’t be reversed now. No matter how hard you try.” As she looked into his eyes, she saw the spark of mischievousness return to them, and he looked at her curiously.

“You really believe that, don’t you?” he asked, cocking his head to one side.

“Of course.”

“Very well,” he said, straightening his jacket. His pensive look was gone entirely, replaced with a stoic blankness that even she couldn’t decipher. She pulled a face, puzzled.

“What, that’s it?” she said, indignant.

Robert smiled enigmatically. “Indeed,” he said curtly. “I shall be out of your way by tomorrow morning.” Rosalind blinked. Whatever she had been expecting, that was not it.

All she had done since that cold day in January, she had done to keep him in this reality. Oh, sure, she had claimed that it was just for scientific curiosity, and that was undeniably a part of it. But from the beginning, she had been captivated by her counterpart. He was her equal, someone she could talk to freely and have them understand her for once. He was her ally in the storm of stubborn ignoramuses that made up Columbia. Somewhere over the course of their interactions, he had become her friend. More than that, he had become her brother. And now he was going to leave, just like that? Involuntarily, her fists clenched.

“Why are you so set on this?” she cried, exasperated. “What’s done is done. The girl is in _this_ universe now.” Looking into Robert’s glassy blue eyes, she only found stubbornness – stubbornness that was an exact mirror of her own determination. “You can’t fight fate.”

“You can _fight_ anything,” Robert smiled humourlessly, tapping the side of his nose. “The question is whether or not you win.”

She took a step back, rapidly assessing the situation. “And you’re going to try. No matter what.”

“It’s all I can do.” With a helpless shrug, he turned to leave. But he was barely at the door when the sound of her voice, low and gentle, stopped him in his tracks.

“Then I suppose I must assist.”

Robert turned back to face her again, beaming genuinely and gratefully. “Thank you, Rosalind.” He tried to take her hand, but she pulled away, staring intently at the carpet.

“Don’t thank me yet. It’s all going to end in tears, just you see.” Her face was drawn, but he was having none of it. Leaning forward, he flicked her chin up, prompting a scornful smile.

“But we will have tried, at least,” he said simply, and this time she let him take her hand.

They shook on it; Rosalind making a face at the needless formality, Robert smirking because he knew that she didn’t really mind. Their hands parted and in the awkward silence that followed, she was almost ready to just get back to work as though nothing had happened, when Robert leaned forward and drew her into a hug.

“Don’t worry so much. I have a plan, you know,” he murmured into her ear, before releasing her with another cocky smirk.

Rosalind envied his endless optimism. There were far too many ways that this could go wrong, and most that she could see ended with Comstock and a gun pointed at their heads. But she had told him she would help, and so she had to, no matter how it ended.

Over the course of the day, Robert related his brilliant plan to her, and she had to admit that it sounded like it could work. ‘Could’, of course, being the operative word. It was going to take a miracle for them to pull it off without a hitch. She tried to be optimistic for his sake, nodding along and asking the right questions whenever he paused for breath, but there were still so many things that could potentially go wrong. If everything went to plan, they could reunite DeWitt and the girl and get out of Columbia before Comstock could retaliate.

But nothing ever goes according to plan.


	6. Ghosts In The Machine

******CHAPTER SIX – GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE**

_So, it appears that we are dead. I must admit, I wasn’t expecting that. Still, we are intact if not alive, and able to carry on as before even if everyone thinks us completely dead. I fear this has only heightened my brother’s zeal with regards to DeWitt and the girl. I had hoped to dissuade him from the endeavour given that we appear to be deceased, but he refuses to be persuaded. It seems that dying has done nothing but heighten our capabilities. How that works is anyone’s guess.  
\- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 1 st of November 1909_

It didn’t even last a month.

Really, neither of the Luteces were particularly surprised by what happened. It was an inevitability that loomed constantly in the back of their minds, hanging over their every move like a dark cloud, never discussed but always present. Robert seemed unconcerned by it all. Whenever Rosalind brought up the possibility that there just _might_ be some negative consequences from going directly against Comstock’s wishes, he shrugged it off, either not acknowledging or not caring about what she was saying. She suspected that it was more the latter than the former. Robert wasn’t stupid, he knew the danger they were putting themselves in as much as she did. He just willingly ignored it.

She still admired his confidence, but she knew that their relative safety could not last. Every day, she half expected their door to be kicked down by Comstock’s men. That Robert was being less than discrete about the whole affair didn’t exactly help. He even insisted on talking about his plan when they were in public, doomed to be overheard by some of Comstock’s agents. It could only lead to trouble – something she told him repeatedly, but he only shrugged her concerns. It seemed that whatever was going to happen would do so without much objection from him.

And so, when the day came, it was almost an anticlimax.

The morning of the 31st of October dawned bright and cold, and the first rays of sunlight illuminated the workspace in Lutece Labs, sparkling off the large Lutece Tear embedded into the middle of the room and straight into Rosalind’s eyes, much to her annoyance. She frowned at the machine, absently tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Something was wrong.

She was awake slightly earlier than usual, being awoken by strange noises coming from downstairs. However, by the time she had got up and made her way downstairs, the noise had gone and there was nobody to be seen. Rather than wake Robert for nothing or go back to sleep for a mere couple of hours, she had decided to get dressed and begin the day’s work early.

They were currently attempting to get the machine to generate Tears that were more stable, that hopefully did not cause a person to lose their memories when they passed through. This would, Robert assured her, be vital in enacting their plan. She disagreed, arguing that it was too difficult to achieve for not enough benefit. After a brief discussion, they had agreed a time limit – if it wasn’t perfected within a month, they would just give up and attempt the plan anyway. It was a possibility that was rapidly looking to become reality. Try as they might, the negative effects of dimensional travel seemed just too strong for them to overcome.

But this was something new. As Rosalind set about putting the machine through its routine tests, it was not behaving the way it should have been.It was the same set of tests they did every morning, but the results she was getting were completely bizarre, way out of the margins for error that they had predicted. She frowned at the machine again, her mind reeling with a thousand possibilities. If she didn’t know better, she would have brushed it off as another fault. But she was in the mood for seeing the worst, and this new development was nothing if not ominous in her eyes.

A sudden banging noise from upstairs made her jump, but it only was Robert, clattering down the stairs behind her. With a slight yawn, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and made his way over to her. "Morning," he said, with a slightly surprised glance. "Isn't this a little early, even for you?"

She was not going to dignify that with an answer. “Look at this, brother. The machine is acting rather oddly this morning.”

Robert looked down at her data, his casual expression deepening into a frown. “Is there something trapped in it again?”

“Not that I can see. And besides, these results are still too different to ignore, even for our usual experiments.”

He nodded, looking uneasily at the main body of the machine. It whirred and clanked threateningly, a spark of electricity crackling across the top of the structure. “It’s almost,” he said, hesitantly, “As though somebody has interfered with its workings.”

Rosalind bit her lip. “I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.”

“Have you come up with a more feasible explanation?”

“As it happens, no.” She picked up her papers, screwing them into a ball and throwing them unceremoniously into a nearby bin. Robert merely shrugged, with a gesture of defeat.

“Then that’s the most credible assumption to make at the minute,” he said simply, moving past Rosalind to examine the machine’s inner workings for himself. Above him, the clanging noise became louder, electricity crackling up and down the body of the machine. Rosalind took a step back, her eyes widening slightly in alarm.

“Robert...” she began, looking down at her brother anxiously.

“That’s not supposed to happen,” he said, straightening up. Resisting the urge to slap him, she instead pointed to the top of the machine, which had begun to vibrate and fizzle, the metal cracking faintly as electricity built up within it.

“It looks as though we are in trouble, dear brother.”

“Ah.” He brushed an invisible speck of dust from his jacket, the gesture hiding the slight tremble to his hands, the momentary look of panic that entered his eyes. “No point in getting out of here, I suppose.”

“Rather too late for that,” she said, noting the slight quaver to her own voice. “It’s probably going to give up any second now and, well, explode.”

“Right.” After a millisecond’s hesitation, Robert held out a hand to her, grinning ruefully. “Then, sister, let me just say that it has been a pleasure knowing you.”

Rosalind smiled, although not without shaking her head mockingly at Robert’s unneeded sentimentalism. “I would have to agree with you there, dear brother.”

She took his hand in hers. At the end of their lives, they stood together, determined not to back down even for one second. And as the machine finally gave in, with a deafening boom that shook the entire street, they died together, each one still gripping the other’s hand.

*

Rosalind opened her eyes. That, in itself, was unexpected.

She was lying on the lab’s floor, staring up at the hole in the ceiling. The fact that there still was a ceiling, and the hole was the one that they’d put in after discovering that the latest model of their machine was too big, led her to deduce that something was amiss. Mostly the fact that, by all accounts, she should be dead.

Pushing herself to her feet, she checked herself for injuries. Her head was pounding and her memory was cloudy, but she was otherwise intact. Even her clothing was as immaculate as it was when she first put it on that morning.

Frowning slightly, she looked up at the room, surveying any potential damage. To her surprise, it looked almost exactly the same as before, almost eerily so. The wood-panelled walls had nary a scratch on them; the machine was back to normal and seemingly functioning, and even the rug was unwrinkled and in the same place.

Really, the only change was in the furniture. Some of it looked as though it had been blown across the room in the blast, and was now haphazardly stacked against the walls. As she watched, a desk seemed to flicker in and out of existence next to her, just like the tears had.

Everything, then, was strangely intact. Everything apart from her brother. He was nowhere to be seen. For a second, she panicked, wondering if he had been lost in the explosion, if he had been killed but she had somehow survived. Her heart started to race.

“Robert?” she shouted, wincing as her voice echoed in the silence. She was answered by a groan from the kitchen area.

“Rosalind?” her brother’s voice called back, a touch quieter. A moment later, Robert emerged from the other room, his clothing as oddly immaculate as hers, one hand touched to his temple and an expression of amazement on his face. She smiled, content that at least she wasn’t alone.

“What happened?” she said slowly. She could remember some things – her waking up, the machine’s odd behaviour, Robert coming down, the explosion...but how they had survived was a complete blank.

Robert shook his head wordlessly, sinking to the floor as he clutched his head harder. Her heart skipped a beat. She recognised this situation; he was acting just as he did before, when the dissonance became too much to handle. But that hadn’t happened in years, not even a small relapse. She sat down next to him, her hand on his shoulder, just as she did all those years ago when he first crossed over.

He squeezed his eyes shut, mumbling under his breath. “I’m not...I don’t know.” His frown deepened. “I think I’m experiencing that dissonance again.”

“I think that was the-” she began, trying to reassure him, before she realised that even she had no idea how to finish that sentence. “Well, whatever happened back there.”

Silence fell across the lab, and in the quiet Rosalind noticed that she couldn’t even hear the familiar hum of the machine in front of them. Which, quite apart from the fact that they had seen it explode not so long ago, was incredibly unusual. The air was crackling with a strange tension that was putting her on edge, making her see every little oddity as something hugely significant – but given the circumstances, that was not hard to understand.

Robert was the one to break the silence, heaving himself to his feet. “Are we...alive?” he said uncertainly, looking around the room as though it was the first time he’d seen it. Bemused, he scratched the back of his head and she groaned inwardly. Apparently, neither of them had a clue what was going on. He leaned down, examining the machine’s inner workings with a practiced eye.

She shrugged, wandering over to join him. “The fault _was_ quite severe,” she reasoned, peering over his shoulder. “Whatever exactly happened, it should have killed us.”

“And yet,” Robert said, standing up. “Here we are.”

“And yet, here we are,” she agreed, turning and inspecting the room further. Everything was still suspiciously normal. The place was almost exactly how they had left it the night before – but the broken and disappearing furniture was proof that all was not as it seemed. They both remembered an explosion, one that should have killed them. So how were they still there, and seemingly still alive?

“One thing we _can_ be certain of,” he said, cutting across her thoughts. She turned to see him standing at the machine again, a grim frown descending upon him. “Sabotage.”

She pursed her lips. Loath as she was to admit it, that was the most likely scenario. “Because of the girl, I assume.”

“Quite.”

“I told you it wouldn’t end well.”

“And I listened! Mostly.”

Rolling her eyes at her brother’s still-optimistic grin, Rosalind gave Robert her patented death glare. He frowned, with an unreadable look on his face.

“Look,” he said, a hint of sternness creeping back into his voice. “We had to at least try to help her. It was never going to be the most _sensible_ of things to do, but under the circumstances...”

She held up a finger, and he trailed off. They were not going to have that argument again, especially because it seemed so superficial in light of the fact that they were possibly dead. Calmly, she suggested that they look for any explanation to what exactly had happened and Robert nodded, glad to have dodged that verbal bullet.

They moved into the upstairs rooms, the little bedroom with the hole in the floor that Rosalind used and Robert’s slightly more intact rooms to the right of the landing. As they predicted, both were messy, but no more or less so than usual. Their notes were still strewn haphazardly around, old voxophones and various bits of equipment that they couldn’t fit downstairs were still stuffed into various corners – but no signs of an earth-shattering explosion. Disheartened, they reconvened at the top of the stairs, still deep in their separate thoughts.

After a moment or two, Rosalind spoke. “We have yet to conclude our mortality status,” she said, her voice breaking the gloomy silence.

“Given that we don’t actually believe in an afterlife, I am inclined to say that we’re still alive.” Robert raised an eyebrow, and Rosalind narrowed her eyes at him, not appreciating the sarcasm. They walked across the landing in silence for a moment, going to try some of the other upstairs rooms for any sign of what had happened. In silence, that is, until Rosalind leaned over and pinched her brother smartly on the arm.

“Ow!” he cried, rubbing his sore arm. “What was that for?” He was the picture of annoyance. Rosalind stifled a smirk at the indignant look on his face.

“Just ruling out the paranormal, brother,” she said, unable to contain her smug smile any longer. “You seem rather too solid for that.”

“You could have given me _some_ warning...” he muttered grumpily, and she snickered.

“My apologies, of course.”

They reached the door at the end of the landing. Robert pulled it open to allow his sister to step through, and a faint breeze ruffled their clothing. Neither Lutece noticed, however. They were still too busy puzzling over their newfound ability to survive explosions.

“So,” Robert began. “We should have been killed by the sabotage.”

“But we’re still here,” Rosalind finished, tapping her fingers together in thought. “And seemingly alive.”

He nodded, irritably swatting at a bee that was buzzing around his head. “Which begs the question – what are we?”

Rosalind merely shrugged. Truth be told, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to continue pursuing the point. The temperature had decided to be extremely warm all of a sudden, and she found herself inexplicably wanting to bask in the sunshine, listening to the seagulls cawing above her, the sand crunching under her feet.

She stopped short. Sand? Seagulls? Sun? Unless something she was very much mistaken, none of those things could typically be found in their upstairs room. And given that she was never wrong, something especially peculiar must have happened in the last minute, another oddity to add to the rapidly-growing list.

Her eyes widened as her attention shifted from her thoughts to their surroundings. Somehow, without either of them noticing, the Lutece twins had been transported from their labs in Emporia to a thankfully-deserted Battleship Bay. They appeared to have come out of one of the little beach huts underneath the promenade, and were now standing to face the fake ocean, lapping on the sand. Rosalind was just glad that it was so early in the morning, and there were no spectators around to gawp at their spontaneous apparition. That would have caused no end of trouble.

Seeing that she had stopped, Robert turned to frown at her. He was apparently just as observant as she was. She half-considered mocking him for it, before realising that she really didn’t have time for hypocrisy.

“I think the more pertinent question would be ‘ _where_ are we’?” she said with a wry smile. His frown deepened, before he realised what she was talking about.

“Ah.” The simple syllable seemed to sum up both of their feelings on the matter. “That shouldn’t have happened.” He stumbled slightly as he looked around at the strange but familiar setting, marvelling at how quickly they seem to have been transported there. “How...?”

A quick look at the hut they appeared to have come out of yielded the answer. When Robert stepped though the door again, he seemed to blink out of existence, returning a few seconds later to confirm that he had in fact gone back to their landing.

“It’s certainly fascinating, isn’t it?” Rosalind commented, checking the doorway for any rogue tears as she did so.

“It shows that the machine did something other than just explode.” Robert joined her, but neither of them could find any evidence of tear activity. Whatever had caused this sudden shift, it was something new, something neither of them had seen before.

In lieu of any other clues, they decided to look around the beach for any other anomalies, doors leading to places they shouldn’t, or evidence that the tears were involved. The investigation, as most of the others before it, proved fruitless – the beach was just a beach, and none of the other doors opened onto portals to different places.

However, stuffed into a corner inside one of the beach huts, Rosalind did find a week-old discarded newspaper. ‘LUTECE TWINS IN FATAL ACCIDENT’ read the headline. She scanned the article with a smirk. Apparently, the two of them had been killed in the explosion, and buried the next day. There was even a photo attached, a slightly blurry image of her and her brother lying in identical coffins, eyes closed and arms folded. It was a sight that would have unnerved anybody else. Rosalind merely found it curious. She waved her brother over, showing him her find.

“Well, the papers seem quite conclusive,” she said briskly, grinning as her brother’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Not only is it next week, but we’re most decisively dead.”

“Next week?” he repeated somewhat incredulously, before he noted the date printed at the top of the page. “Ah, yes. That’s a terrible photograph.”

Rosalind’s lips twisted into a mischievous grin. “Perhaps we should tell Cunningham that,” she remarked with a slight air of malice. An identical smirk grew on Robert’s face as he mulled it over.

“I think we’d send him to his own grave,” he commented.

“Most likely. Let’s do it anyway.”

“Was that a hint of sadism, dear sister?”

“More likely a hint of curiosity.” She gestured around them enthusiastically, pointing out the lack of onlookers there to observe them. “There’s nobody here now, but they’ll soon be waking up. I wonder how they’d react, if they knew?” But when she turned back to Robert, she found him contemplative, frowing at her with a thoughtful look.

“Is that all you’re wondering?”

“What do you mean?”

He paused for a second, tapping his bottom lip with a single finger. “The extent of this...travel,” he said, hesitantly. “How _did_ we get here? Are we using the tears, like the girl?”

“That door was not a tear.” Rosalind interjected decisively.

“Then what we can do is different, albeit connected. They’re both tied to the machine, after all.” He thought about it, leaning back on a nearby barrel and rubbing his chin.

“This new ability,” she said, putting into words what they were both thinking. “It could possibly be caused by the machine’s nature. And ours, now.” She sighed, biting her lip. “We’re dead, yet also alive. I’d say we were in a different universe but for the fact that we’re not experiencing the same side effects.”

“And I’d be able to tell.” Robert’s tone was bitter, as he almost spat out the words. “This is something new.” His quizzical gaze was piercing, and she found herself glancing uncomfortably down at the ground. “Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked, but his confusion was alien to her.

The question took Rosalind by surprise. “What, that we’re dead?” she stuttered, her pitch rising in confusion. “No. We’re still here. Still together. Why would that bother me?”

“I suppose it wouldn’t.” Robert said, his voice low. She gave him a quizzical look, turning back to watch the artificial waves lapping on the beach. His question had shaken her more than she would admit. Was he expecting her to be perturbed by this? It was a new reflection on what the machine could do, a new advancement for the two of them to investigate. Did it bother him? She couldn’t see why.

After a moment, he spoke again, in the same low, quiet tone. “We are like ghosts in one way, you know.”

“How so?” She looked at him, still hunched over in a thoughtful way.

“Unfinished business. Regarding the girl. And DeWitt.”

“I suppose we need to alter our plan.”

He nodded his agreement. “This...state. It might even be beneficial to us, assuming that we can understand it, learn to control it...”

“If you insist, brother.”

Noting her lingering reluctance, he came up behind her, placing a hand on her shoulder and giving her a wide, reassuring smile. “Don’t be so cynical, sister. With the combination of this new talent and the girl’s powers, how can we fail?”

“Very easily.” She smiled at him wryly, causing him to roll his eyes at her. Wordlessly, she took his arm, leading him back to the door that opened to the labs.

They had a thousand questions, of course, and time and study would hopefully provide the answers. But at that moment, the two of them were happy to exist, happy to be together even though death itself had tried to keep them apart. They could still work together, still plan together, still experiment and theorise together. And, for the time being, they were indeed free from the shadow of Comstock’s tyranny. If he thought them dead, they would no longer need to hide their intentions from him. They could plot against him to their heart’s content, free of the endless paranoia that had plagued them,

But a new shadow dawned on the horizon, the shadow of the future. Robert’s plan might bring liberation for some, but for the Lutece twins, worse was yet to come. It may have been so far in the future that neither, at that time anyway, had even considered it, but the darkness was coming to envelop them. And when it came, it came in the form of a man and a lighthouse.


	7. A Long Day

**CHAPTER SEVEN – A LONG DAY**

_Dating these notes is somewhat pointless, given that we have existed in July the 21 st for a couple of months at my estimate. We have gotten so used to it that we could act it out exactly, were we so inclined. Any variation is minimal. Different flowers, perhaps, or one person wearing a slightly different hat. A theory: there are an infinite number of universes with the basic structure of this one, displaying minimal alterations that stem from the inconsequential choices that we make. It is only when a large decision is made that we experience significantly different universes, such as the case of Robert and I.  
\- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 21st of July 1912_

It was a sunny day in Battleship Bay. Then again, it had been a sunny day in Battleship Bay for approximately two and a half months. That particular day was July the 21st, and Robert and Rosalind were beginning to get incredibly bored of it.

The Lutece twins were leaning over the parapet overlooking the beach, taking it in turns to watch Memorial Tower. If it began to show damage in the next three minutes, Rosalind owed Robert some cotton candy. That was one of the best ways to entertain themselves; but more importantly, it was a way to test the boundaries of their new existence outside time, by placing bets on the variables between different realities. It also served quite well as an ongoing analysis of what, exactly, they were capable of.

Assessing their abilities proved to be a challenge. After their first experience with random teleportation, the Luteces had discovered that they seemed to be able to travel as though through a tear – across both time and probability, just as the girl had done when she was younger. Except their power was different. While the girl needed to open tears, they found that they could travel through force of willpower alone, sometimes creating tears and sometime simply walking from one reality to the next.

Robert was ecstatic. His original ideas of bringing DeWitt to their universe through their tears had just become a lot easier. Travel through probabilities took practice, but was a lot easier for them to use than the machine.

His enthusiasm was almost contagious. Rosalind often found herself getting caught up in his ridiculous rambles about the implications of this new discovery. For herself, she was slightly less enthused but no less intrigued. Their new capacity for interdimensional travel proved useful, but at first they had no idea how to use them.

Implicating Robert’s plan proved as difficult as Rosalind had feared. Comstock seemed to know about the plan through his ‘prophetic powers’, and made every move he could to stop it, causing Rosalind to rue the day that she had given him the ability to use the tears. Despite the fact that he thought them dead, he knew about DeWitt (or the ‘False Shepherd’) and had a thousand plans set in place to stop him reaching the girl.

The fourth DeWitt, for example, had been sent off to the lighthouse as usual, but had never managed to get to the top and ascend to Columbia. They had given him half an hour before they went after him, guessing that something must have gone particularly wrong if he hadn’t even reached the city. The gloomy lighthouse was dim, and in the darkness Rosalind managed to trip over something that was disgustingly fleshy – something that, upon investigation, turned out to be DeWitt’s dead body.

Upstairs, a twitchy lighthouse keeper clutched a smoking pistol. As they ascended to meet him, he had wasted his precious time boggling at them, stammering about how they were supposed to be dead. Robert had wasted no time in knocking the man out with a nearby book, giving Rosalind time to shoot him through the head with his own pistol.

Later attempts had turned this into an art form. Through experience, they knew where everyone would be, and what they could expect. They knew to go to the lighthouse before bringing DeWitt through, catching the would-be assassin off guard and disposing of him as they saw fit. As an added touch, they had even brought him into their little façade around DeWitt’s memory loss, pinning a threatening note to the corpse that (according to Robert) would help stabilise his delusions and ease him into this new reality.

It seemed to have worked, anyway. None of the later DeWitts that they had pulled through seemed to have the same extreme side-effects that Robert had experienced; not unless Comstock triggered them, anyway. He was the only one other than them who knew DeWitt’s true identity. The Prophet lived up to his title, seeing what DeWitt would do and dispatching his forces to combat him, which had sent many DeWitts to their untimely deaths. It was irritating, but the DeWitts had a surprising ability to overcome Columbia’s police force. Her brother seemed to think that was evidence enough that they would succeed. She was not so sure.

In the distance, a small figure moved up the ramp on the side of the tower, the sunlight glinting off the polished bronze behind them. Robert nudged Rosalind, pointing the silhouette out to her. She squinted at the tower, a hand over her eyes to shade them from the sun, but even from this distance they could tell it was DeWitt, right on cue.

Robert smiled, pausing mid-tirade to commend DeWitt’s inventiveness. They had been debating his latest ideas on DeWitt, and how they could succeed in getting the girl back to her own universe without too many complications. She found his endless zeal encouraging, especially given that their theories on the apparently infinite realities were fascinating in their own right, but she still made her apprehension towards the whole thing clear.

“What I’m saying,” he said, concluding his argument. “Is that our overall success depends on him regaining his old memory. Does that make sense?”

She frowned mischievously, mulling over his exact wording. “Depends?” she asked, her tone playful. Ever since they had perfected the art of time travel, such wordplay about semantics was common between the twins.

He rolled his eyes, resigned to what he regarded as a foolish discussion. “Will depend. Has depended?”

“Under the circumstances, I’d say it will has depended.”

“Semantics aside, you’re avoiding the question.”

“Am I?”

“Don’t start.”

With a chuckle, she turned away from the tower, leaning on the railings behind her and looking back to quiet bustling of the market stalls opposite. “It sounds about right, especially given that his ultimate motivation always includes his peculiar affiliation to the girl.”

At that, Robert raised an eyebrow, giving her a sideways look. “You really think it’s that strange? He _is_ her father,” he said, a quizzical note creeping into his voice.

“He doesn’t know that,” she replied, simply. “To him, she’s just a job.”

Robert raised a finger, about to protest, but whatever he was going to say was rudely interrupted by a screeching noise from behind them. The Songbird had landed on top of Monument Tower, and seemed to be intent on shredding it to pieces, claws ripping through the shining bronze exterior, forcing its head into the gaps to search for its ward. It screeched again, head disappearing through a gap in the statue’s face.

The beachgoers that were milling around the promenade instantly turned to the spectacle, open-mouthed. She overheard the man standing nearest to her mutter something about the Vox Populi, which made her snort sardonically; that Fitzroy woman might have come a long way since Lady Comstock’s murder, but Rosalind seriously doubted that she had the resources or the motivation to get rid of Monument Tower. She was, however, an excellent scapegoat for the more gullible Columbians.

Neither Lutece bothered to even give the scene a passing glance. The sight of the spectacular tower being destroyed had a tendency to grow old after the tenth time one watched it.

“And there goes another tower,” she sighed, her face contorting into a disapproving grimace.

“It’s a sign of progress! They’ll be on the beach soon.” Robert protested, grinning just a little too widely for comfort. She had a suspicion that he enjoyed the outcome of DeWitt’s destructive tendencies just a little too much.

“Why does ‘progress’ seem to take the form of gunfire and explosions with DeWitt?” Rosalind scowled, leaning once more on the railings, her fingers knotted behind her head. “If you ask me, it’s just more evidence for our ultimate failure.”

“Not quite.” He leaned forward, playfully wagging a finger at her. “If they fail, we can always have started again.”

“For the thousandth time.”

He smirked. “I believe the count is closer to eighty seven at this point in time.”

“Whose time?”

“Personal time. Of course. For him, it always will be the first.”

Eighty seven. Rosalind could certainly believe that it had been that many. She had in fact lost count of the amount of times they had pulled DeWitt from his dingy apartment into the bracing air of the rickety pier that they used as a base, sending him off to Columbia with only a pistol that he invariably lost on the way. And she had also lost count of the corpses they had seen, the failed DeWitts who died along the way, bodies riddled with bullets or thrown from buildings, dying ignobly for Robert’s cause.

He didn’t seem to see the negative side of his little crusade, no matter how many times she tried to open his eyes. Even then, he couldn’t see it. Monument Tower was crumbling before their eyes, the girl and DeWitt plunging almost to their deaths from the top of the structure, and all he could say was that it was progress. As she watched him revelling in the anarchy DeWitt left in his wake, she mused that that day was as good as any to try and get across the point. “I still don’t believe that this exercise will work,” she began conversationally, trying to ease him gently into the argument.

Robert, however, could see through her immediately. He folded his arms, looking her square in the face with an exasperated frown. “And _I_ still hold that there’s no harm in trying.” Resting his arms on the railing, he gazed out at the distant figure of the girl dragging DeWitt out of the artificial ocean. In a moment, he would revive, and she would go to join the musicians on the little jetty. It was a brief moment of joy that the girl was so rarely afforded, and Robert had recently developed a curious fondness for seeing the girl happy. It bemused Rosalind, who saw the girl as more of an obstacle than anything.

“Besides,” he added, offhandedly. “We really have nothing better to be doing, and you knowmy opinion on the girl and what we have done to her.”  His face settled into a look of stoic determination. The implication was clear; he obviously did not want her to press the matter any further. Which was exactly the reason why she did.

“But if he does succeed?” she said. “If the girl alters the timeline. What happens to us?” It was a question that she had been avoiding for a long time, ever since Robert first detailed his plans to her. And, by the look on Robert’s face, it wasn’t one that he had put much thought into either.

“I assume we will never have met,” he said, attempting to shrug her question off.

“A disappointing prospect.” Her words were glib, to mask the sudden icy lump that had materialised in her throat. She bit her lip, anxiously sneaking a glance at Robert to see if he had noticed. Thankfully, her brother was as oblivious as ever.

“Quite.” He was still staring out into the fake ocean, somewhat more pensively than before, but his expression brightened when a new thought came to him. “However, there’s nothing to stop us making the same discoveries without Comstock’s money. I certainly did.” He looked over at Rosalind with a chuckle, but she remained unconvinced. Comstock was the main reason that she had pursued the Lutece Field project for so long. Without that, she could see no way that they could ever have contacted each other initially.

If they had gone through all of this, just to have it erased so suddenly? She had no idea what she would do. Even when she was on the brink of him leaving before, she knew that she would do everything in her power to make him stay. He was her equal, after all, a position no other could claim. They had become inseparable, not only through the abilities afforded by the accident, but by virtue of a shared passion, a common love of knowledge. Losing him would be unbearable.

She considered telling him that, but decided that she didn’t have the heart to blacken his mood. Instead, she merely shrugged. “It will be harder to implement,” she said, hoping Robert didn’t notice the slight tremble to her voice.

“We shall see. Or rather, we will have seen.”

Unconsciously, Rosalind’s fists clenched. How could he be taking their inevitable erasure from the multiverse so calmly? “But that’s _if_ he ever succeeds,” she pressed, in a futile attempt to get Robert to acknowledge some chance of failure. He merely smiled at her, his cheery attitude the exact opposite of her lingering sense of dread.

“Which he shall!” Robert’s voice was almost smug. “It’s all down to constants and variables.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, must you harp on about this theory of yours?”

He ignored her, pacing up and down the boardwalk in front of her and gesticulating wildly. “Constant: we take DeWitt out of his universe and to the lighthouse.”

Rosalind watched him wander, her face set in a look of resigned cynicism. “Variable,” she deadpanned. “He actually _survives_ to get to Columbia.”

With a smirk, Robert held a finger up to silence her. “Constant! He heads to the raffle after entering the city.”

“Variable!” Rosalind smiled despite herself. She did enjoy arguing with her brother. “He manages to fight off the ignorant mob trying to murder him!” She didn’t care that their voices were raised; they had long ago discovered that the people of Columbia had a curious habit of never seeming to notice them, even when they were actively trying to attract their attention. They had come to the conclusion that, since everyone thought the twins were dead, their quantum state made it so they didn’t appear to them. Whatever the cause, it was handy when they needed to discuss vital information that the ignorant mob should never know. Or, of course, when they were engaged in a childish shouting match.

“Constant!” Robert retorted, his competitive nature beginning to shine through. “He reaches the girl in the tower!”

“Variable! He gets her out of said tower without being pecked to death by that blasted bird!”

“Constant! He is determined to get the girl to New York to pay off his apparent debts!”

“Constant! Robert Lutece is a sore loser who never knows when to concede defeat!”

During their ‘debate’, the pair had moved closer and closer together, until they were almost shouting in each other’s faces. Rosalind, feeling she had the upper hand, grinned triumphantly and turned on her heel to walk away from the argument.

Robert had other ideas. “...constant,” he said slowly, cheeks slightly reddening from a mixture of embarrassment and amusement. “Rosalind Lutece is too stubborn and pig-headed to accept her poor hardworking brother’s point of view.” He folded his arms, only just resisting the urge to stick his tongue out at her.

“Constant,” she rebutted, haughtily. “ _Any_ Lutece is far too similar to avoid hypocrisy when criticising their counterparts.”

Lost in the spirit of the argument, Robert frowned for a second, mulling this over. “Really? There were a number of noticeable differences when we compared our respective childhoods.”

“Yes,” she said, leaning backwards onto the railings with a playful grin. “But not enough to truly make that much of a difference. Besides, most of them were gender-related.”

“Really? I didn’t think that would make _too_ much of a difference.”

She gave him a look, as well as a condescending pat on the head that ruffled his otherwise-neat copper hair. “Well,” she said, suppressing a smile at his disgruntled attempts to neaten it up again. “I assume you didn’t receive numerous lectures from Mother about how your interests are _far_ too unladylike to continue pursuing, or argue incessantly about her trying to send you to a finishing school rather than actual education-”

“I think I get the picture,” Robert interrupted dryly, placing a hand on his sister’s shoulder. “And you won’t have survived countless exasperating speeches from Father about how a career in physics isn’t exactly what he had in mind for you, and why can’t you just go and do something more befitting of a _respectable_ young man?”

“Constant; our parents had airs, and no appreciation for physicists?”

“Most definitely.” Robert smiled warmly. “But I think we’ve strayed from the point somewhat.”

The sun glinted off a nearby window, and into Rosalind’s eyes. Turning back to watch the beach, she sighed almost contentedly. As tedious as living through the same day so many times could get, she had to admit that she could nearly become used to it. It meant time spent with Robert, on a sunny day in late July, when the air was warm and they had a few hours to enjoy their surroundings. If it weren’t for the obligatory chaos caused by DeWitt, the day would be virtually pleasant.

“I think we should just quit while we’re ahead,” she commented, resting her arms on the railing.

Robert frowned. “I think it’s rather too late for that, even if I didn’t disagree on principle.”

“I meant with the argument.”

“Well, that we can agree on.”

Beneath them, DeWitt ran down the jetty, frantically trying to catch the girl’s attention and stop her from dancing. They conversed for a moment, the girl spinning around ecstatically and attempting to convince him to dance with her, but he shook his head, gesturing to a passing airship. She seemed excited at that, taking DeWitt’s hand and dragging him back onto the beach.

In Rosalind’s experience that exchange would last a while, but the girl always relented to DeWitt, falling for his ploy about the First Lady taking them both to her beloved Paris. She would call it a constant, were it not for the fact that it would just encourage her brother.

Seemingly glad that he had convinced her to move, DeWitt and the girl began exploring the beach, occasionally stopping to make idle conversation with the few scattered Columbians, or rifle through a discarded basket for anything useful. Over the many 21sts of July they had lived through, the Luteces had observed DeWitt’s slightly eccentric behaviour, but they didn’t consider it especially noteworthy. If he wanted to eat out of trash cans, that was no concern of theirs.

“Shall we get into position? They’re on the beach.” Robert asked, cutting into her thoughts. She nodded distractedly, still watching the pair of them running around on the beach. The girl, much to DeWitt’s exasperation, had found a small bucket full of stones, and was passing the time by skipping them across the water. She was good at it too, the ripples she made as the pebbles skimmed the water’s edge softly running into each other as she kept trying. DeWitt was standing nearby, tapping his foot impatiently as he watched her play.

“How long do you think she’ll distract him this time?” she said, pointing the scene out to her brother. He shrugged.

“Quite a while, by the looks of that.”

“Care for a wager?” The mischievous note had returned to her voice as she smirked at her brother. Robert’s expression twisted to mirror her own as he joined her in leaning over the railings.

“Always,” he said, chuckling.

“If it’s more than five minutes, I’ll row for the next ones.”

Robert rubbed his hands together gleefully. “An excellent proposition!” he declared, eliciting another snigger from Rosalind. He was always complaining about having to row DeWitt after DeWitt to the lighthouse, and sniping at her whenever she refused to help him.

Beneath them, DeWitt finally led the girl to the exit, disappearing through the turnstiles into the Battleship Bay’s gift shop. Rosalind smiled, satisfied.

“Oh, look, there they go. That was…significantly less than five minutes. I believe that I win.” She gave him a triumphant look, but her brother merely shrugged, sighing emphatically.

“I knew it.”

“No, you didn’t!” she exclaimed, indignant.

“My rowing is a constant.” He grinned smugly, and once again Rosalind found herself resisting the temptation to slap him.

“Oh, shut up,” she said instead, grabbing the little cushion with the cage choker from the railing next to her. “Here they come.”

And, for the eighty seventh time, the girl approached them, cooing over the gaudy pendants they held before them. No matter how many times they repeated the same, familiar words, their curiosity about the events never waned. Sometimes the girl would choose the bird; sometimes, the cage. It wasn’t one of Robert’s constants, a point they often debated on. Their general consensus was that while some small things could easily change between their variant realities, others would by nature be the same in all timelines. The choker’s design didn’t matter, it could vary from DeWitt to DeWitt, but the fact that they picked it up never changed.

But in the grand scheme of things, nothing ever changed. The girl picked one or the other, then noticed the state her tower was in. She and DeWitt would head off, only to meet their inevitable doom somewhere down the line, forcing the Luteces to start again with a different DeWitt. It seemed that they were going to do this forever – or at least, until the day that Booker DeWitt finally managed to change the universe.

Not that she would dwell on that, of course. That day was far away. DeWitt was making some progress, but he never seemed to get far enough to end their little charade, not to mention the fact that Comstock was always determined to stop him, no matter what the cost. And while Rosalind still harboured that uneasy fear about the outcome of their actions, she was content that she and Robert could still continue as they were for some time.

So when the day finally came, it caught them both off-guard.


	8. Uncertain Pasts

**CHAPTER EIGHT – UNCERTAIN PASTS** ****

_What will happen to us, if DeWitt succeeds? It is a question I find myself hesitant to answer. If DeWitt succeeds, then he shall make it so that Comstock was never created, that the universe never ran this course. But where does that leave us? Without Comstock’s funding, the Lutece Tear will never have become a reality. Without our measuring of that one, tiny, insignificant particle, Robert and I will never have come into contact. I fear for the implications of this. My brother does not. He is of the opinion that now we have set this in motion, we must see it carried out. I suppose we have no real choice, now. But I still can’t help wondering...  
\- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 21 st of July1912_

Rain lashed down upon the old lighthouse. The ancient building creaked and moaned in protest against the roaring wind, a single light flickering in one of the upstairs windows. Grey waves beat against the rock on which the little lighthouse stood and lashed over the wooden jetty, which was groaning under the weight of the pair that stood on it, engrossed in deep discussion. To the side, a rowboat, half-concealed under the jetty, bobbed and rocked in the water, its yellow-coated occupants starkly silent by contrast.

Rosalind watched as DeWitt and the girl ran towards the lighthouse, hesitating only a second before they pushed open the rickety wooden door and disappeared in a flash of light. She knew they weren’t inside the lighthouse; they weren’t even in the same reality any more. The door had taken them away, hundreds of miles in distance and decades back in time. They were gone, and this universe was soon to follow.

They had done it. After months of toil and preparation, they were about to achieve their ultimate goal. Comstock was dead, lying drowned in a baptismal font aboard his own airship. The Songbird, too, had drowned, crushed by the ocean’s pressure in a city that didn’t even exist. Daisy Fitzroy, Jeremiah Fink, Cornelius Slate – anyone that could ever have stood in their way had been killed, and only DeWitt and the girl remained.

But that was only in this universe. Thousands upon thousands of other realities existed, and in each one was a Slate, a Fink, a Fitzroy, a Songbird, a Comstock. And in those realities, a girl who was once named Anna was still trapped in her tower, with no DeWitt to bring her the key. There was still a functioning city in the sky, ready to rain down fire upon the unworthy of the world. All was not saved because one world was rid of its scourges.

It had always been Robert’s plan to completely erase Comstock. That was the only way he could ever be satisfied – not just with the girl being reunited with her true father, but with her never being taken from him in the first place. But, it seemed, as long as there was a Comstock, there was an ‘Elizabeth’. So to remove the latter from her predicament, they must erase the former.

She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose as she thought back. What Robert had proposed, back in their labs all that time ago, had seemed impossible. There were too many universes out there to fix, and the Luteces alone could never hope to match the power Comstock wielded.

Then they remembered the girl, and it all fell into place.

Elizabeth was strong. She could, given time and practice, use her powers to do anything; fix every wrongdoing that had ever happened, or rip the world apart piece by piece if she chose. But they had guided her, and she had instead grown to hold to their ultimate goal – the annihilation of every single variant of Comstock. They gave her the needed push, and she had risen to the challenge.

Now, they were all going to pay the price. Their timeline would be rewritten, every second since Comstock had come into existence being reversed and changed, in both subtle and obvious ways. And when that was done, they wouldn’t even know the difference. It would be as though their world had never included a man known as Comstock. Nobody would recall that Columbia had been built, much less that it had been a working city for decades. Not a single person alive would know about their greatest feat of scientific wonder, or the horrors that had sprung from it. And she wouldn’t remember ever meeting Robert Lutece.

Suddenly, all of the fear and anxiety that she had been feeling about this plan hit her so hard that she could almost feel it, knocking the breath out of her. It was really happening. Soon she and Robert would be parted, perhaps to never meet again. Or rather, to never have met in the first place. She would be forced to live a life without Columbia, without her brother and the intellect he brought, without his strange sense of humour and omnipresent smile.

What kind of a life was that? Where she was alone – no, she recalled as a look of wry contempt snuck onto her face, not completely alone, surrounded by moronic lab assistants, which was arguably worse – and where she was unsuccessful, with nobody there to fund her and keep her lab afloat. She would end up unfulfilled, a solitary figure in a stained lab coat, nobody knowing who she was or what she had once dreamed. By comparison, being technically dead seemed the better option. At least she died achieving something, her brother by her side. At least she didn’t have to endure being alone.

Dimly, she was aware that Robert was staring at her through the rain, concern etched into his features.

“You’re quiet,” he said, his voice barely audible over the howling of the wind.

“Just thinking.” Absently, she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, all the while avoiding her brother’s knowing gaze. She had been avoiding this conversation for months. There was no reason why they couldn’t avoid it for a few more minutes.

Robert, however, did not want to take ‘no’ for an answer. Abandoning the oars that he was still holding, he leaned forward slightly, hands resting awkwardly on his knees. Wordlessly, he nodded to her, his gentle gaze imploring her to continue.

She shrugged helplessly, still not entirely willing to accept what was happening. “Well,” she said, her voice quiet against the wind and rain. “We’ve done it.” Now she looked her brother in the face, her eyes blazing with a mixture of defiant anger and hopeless denial. “So tell me, brother, what happens now?”

It was him who was avoiding her gaze now. “What do you mean?” he stammered, rubbing the nape of his neck uneasily.

“I mean, what happens to us?”

An uncomfortable quiet descended, punctuated only by the harsh pattering of rain on the wooden jetty and the howling wind that rocked their little boat. They both knew the answer to that, but neither wanted to say it aloud, as if by vocalising the truth they would make it something real, something tangible and unavoidable.

Their reality was going to be wiped out. How exactly that would happen, and how much time they had before the ball dropped, were unknowns, but the painful truth was that soon they would cease to exist, replaced by another timeline that did not include a man named Comstock. It was a fact, and one that they couldn’t get around, try as they might to come up with alternate solutions.

Robert sighed, slumping backwards and making the boat rock unpleasantly. She bit her lip and glanced up once more, only for their eyes to meet again. They sat for a moment, her staring into his icy blue eyes, identical to hers in everything but the defeat they displayed. Rosalind bit her lip, suddenly sorry for blaming him for their situation. As much as she had protested against them, she could see the nobility in his actions.

She fully admitted her own selfishness in wanting to maintain the status quo. And she would still argue that they were delivering the girl to a worse situation, that she might have even been better off growing up as Comstock’s pampered little caged bird than the poverty-stricken reminder of DeWitt’s regret.

“I only know as much as you do.” Robert’s voice, laced with bitterness, cut into her thoughts. “And I know, if there was another way to have done this without sacrificing...” He stopped, shaking his head faintly as if to clear it. He was clutching his arm anxiously, shoulders slumped in a gesture of defeat. Her heart ached to see him like this; he hadn’t truly looked this lost and downcast since his last strong period of dissonance. It wasn’t fair to him to keep complaining about what had been, not in their last few moments of existence.

“But there wasn’t.” She finished for him finally, and he unfurled himself a little, the ghost of a smile returning to his face. “I know. This is inevitable, I suppose.”

He raised an eyebrow at that, the spark of happiness returning to his eyes. “Do you mean to say,” he began, carefully. “That you don’t completely despise me for all of this?”

“Not _completely_...” Robert pouted sardonically, and she laughed, glad to see that he was, once again, in the mood for jokes. “Anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it now, is there?” She smirked at him, and his pout dissolved into a genuine look of happiness.

With a satisfied nod, he drew himself up, deciding in an instant to clamber clumsily out of the boat, to sit on the edge of the jetty. She gave him a quizzical stare and, with a smirk, he shouted down that they had a better view from up there. Robert held his hand out to her, and she allowed him to aid her in reaching him, sitting inelegantly beside him and gazing out at the turbulent sea.

But something was wrong. With a slight frown, she suddenly registered the lack of rain splashing onto the water before them. A quick glance upwards confirmed her suspicions. The rain had stopped.

Robert noticed in the same second, turning his head to the still-cloudy sky. In unison, both Luteces pulled their ridiculous coats off and tossed them aside into the water, leaving them to bob, abandoned, two small splashes of yellow in the endless grey sea.

The rain had stopped. In all the time they had spent at this lighthouse, ferrying DeWitt after DeWitt across to the jetty, there had never been any different weather. No snow, no hail, no sun, nothing. Every single time, it had been raining. Every single one of those 123 DeWitts had come to Columbia through a storm. It was another constant in their varied existence, something that was always there, always true. The rain never stopped.

And yet. The air was dry. Even as they sat, the wind was slowing to a quiet breeze, ruffling their hair slightly and creating smooth ripples on the water’s surface. The storm had passed, and the silence was deafening.

“It’s starting,” he murmured, panic finally beginning to set in. “Things are changing unpredictably. We don’t have much time left.” Rosalind didn’t respond – he was just vocalising his thoughts, saying out loud what both of them were thinking.

They sat side by side, and after a moment the raincoats that they had discarded floated past, the only colour in the bleakness of the landscape. As they watched, they flickered and disappeared, blinking out of existence without a second’s notice, and leaving nary a ripple in the dark water. Now all around them was dark and grey. Unconsciously, Robert drew slightly closer to his sister.

“It’ll be alright,” he carried on, glancing at her over his shoulder. “I mean, there shouldn’t be too much of a difference, should there?”

“That’s easy for you to say,” she snapped, but a quick glance at his expression made her regret her harsh tone. Wincing, she continued. “Your universe will be almost exactly the same.”

Robert’s face fell, and he returned to gazing off into the horizon, shoulders slumped and eyes distant. “I can’t exactly help that.”

“I know.” Rosalind’s voice was quieter, calmer, and she placed a reassuring hand on her brother’s shoulder. His head didn’t move, but a faint smile once again appeared on his lips. “I just wonder what’s going to happen, that’s all.”

“Besides, you forget our extra-temporal nature.” He glanced towards her, trying to gauge a reaction – she didn’t even blink, her hand still resting on his shoulder. “Perhaps we shall remain as we are, and all this melodrama will have been for nothing.”

Her mouth curved into a sad smile. “It’s unlikely,” she said stoically, not rising to meet his optimism. Even now, she refused to give in to the allure of the idealistic. She had predicted that this would end in tears, and nothing that had happened so far had convinced her otherwise, not even their apparent success. Success for the girl, after all, only meant failure for them, failure to keep them together, failure to keep hold on their universe, failure to find any way of continuing their happiness together.

Robert merely shrugged. “Given that what we’re doing is rather unprecedented, who knows what’s likely anymore.”

They continued to sit together, arm in arm in the face of the apocalypse, staring out into the calming sea as the universe continued to end. Beneath them, the boat that they had rowed so many times to the lighthouse shimmered and vanished, leaving not a single trace of evidence that it had been there. Even the clouds appeared to have parted, leaving the dark sky visible for all to see. But the stars that shone above were dim, as if the doors they concealed were beginning to close in anticipation of this world’s end.

Still, as she gazed up at the tiny, flickering pinpricks of light, Rosalind couldn’t help but marvel at what she was seeing. They had enabled this. Just sitting there, she was looking at thousands of other realities, thousands of other possibilities. No other person could ever make such a claim, to look into the fabric of time and probability so casually and see the door to every prospect, every reality that ever had or ever would exist. Together, she and Robert had made that possible. And because one man had warped it for his own selfish ends, it was going to be undone.

Broodingly, she looked across to Robert, giving him a long, quizzical stare. “It doesn’t bother you?” she asked, no longer able to contain her curiosity. “That we’ve done all of this work, made all of these discoveries, and now even we won’t be able to remember them?” She paused for a second, smiling humourlessly as she realised the irony of it. “Even that fact attests to the brilliance of the machine! We’ve rewritten history, literally! But nobody will ever know.”

“Narcissist.” Robert shot back, chuckling gently. She raised an eyebrow, refusing to be sidetracked, and he paused, one hand absently stroking his chin in thought. “Maybe. But the girl is safe now. Comstock can’t ruin any more lives. The end result is far greater than the sacrifices we had to make.”

“Even if that sacrifice is our life’s work, or even our existence?” There was a coldness in her eyes, reflecting a part of her that was still afraid, even now, of the dangers that the end brought. He closed his eyes, sighing deeply.

“Even then.” His voice was stern, of the type that invited no discussions or arguments. It was clear that his mind was made up. To him, it seemed, action was better than inaction. He could never stand idly by and let things happen. While she would have been content to ignore Columbia’s ills, he saw injustice and wanted to do something about it. Especially when that injustice was their doing.

She was still torn. One would have to be blind to fail to notice the wrongdoings in Columbia. The evils of people such as Fink and Comstock were obvious to everyone not brainwashed by the latter’s propaganda – but she didn’t see why _they_ had to interfere. She would have been content to leave their little world as it was, continue to work with her brother and let things run their own course. And why not? She was happy. Robert was happy. Wasn’t that all that mattered?

Internally, Rosalind chastised herself for the tangent that her thoughts had wandered down. The fact was that there was no way to change what was done. Things had been set in motion. Events had begun to effect their world. Time was running out. There was no point in sitting and debating the morality of what was already done. Better to look to the positive, before it was too late to say anything. Some good had come out of the last twenty years. It would be crass to ignore that now.

“Still,” she said aloud. “I’m glad that we had that. That time, I mean.” Rosalind winced internally, not happy to be mangling her words in such a manner.

“I’m glad that we could meet,” she clarified. “Even if it can’t last.”

She smiled at her brother, more warmly this time, and he responded in kind, an identical expression lighting up his face. Putting an arm around him, she drew herself closer, and they watched the sky together as the last dot of distant starlight went out.

The air felt colder in the sudden darkness afforded by the absence of the stars. Rosalind could feel her brother shivering beside her, and in the pale light of the still-present moon she could see his breath escaping his mouth, lucent as a ghost. The black water swirled beneath their feet, calmer than either of them had ever seen it. Everything was still.

A slight motion beside them caused both Luteces to turn their heads. The lighthouse had gone, flickering like a candlelight before being extinguished just as easily. They traded looks, knowing that they were both thinking the same thing. The lighthouse had been built as a gateway to Columbia. If the lighthouse was gone, then was the city? It was a curious thought, that the technological marvel that had been their home for sixteen years, could vanish in a single second. A lump formed in Rosalind’s throat. This was, truly, the end, then. They could only have minutes.

In a burst of impulse, she took her brother’s hand, feeling its comforting warmth against her skin. He turned to look at her, a ghostly smile still gracing his face.

“Rosalind, I-”

He never got to finish his sentence. In that second, everything seemed to stop, the atmosphere thinning and air growing cold and silent. Then, before either of them could react, they were spinning through the void, hearts pounding as they swept through nothingness.

She tried to shout something to Robert – a warning, a goodbye – but her muscles wouldn’t obey and her mouth couldn’t open. She could only watch as they were torn apart, as he fell into the all-consuming entropy of probability, swallowed by something she couldn’t even see, disappearing suddenly into the bleak nothingness that surrounded them, one second there and the next, gone. She was alone. She was falling. Then she was gone.

The world went white. 


	9. Unknown Futures

**CHAPTER NINE – UNKNOWN FUTURES**

_I am beginning to consider my career in Physics something of a disappointment. Still no luck with...well, anything, really. Research. Funding. Getting my lab assistants to make a decent cup of tea. If it carries on like this for a few more months I may be forced to give it up and marry some boring old man as my mother always intended. It won’t actually come to that, of course, but I can’t help but wonder if that might have been the easier course of action. At least it would please someone.  
\- From the personal notes of Rosalind Lutece, dated 8 th of October 1893_

_I worry for my sanity. These dreams are constant and confusing. There is no logical reason for them, and yet they persist. Such bizarre visions – a city in the sky, people shooting fire from their hands, a girl who can travel through time and probability, a woman who was both like and unlike me …this morning, however, was truly a unique experience. I had fallen asleep at my desk, and awoke to find that I had somehow managed to fill an entire log book with sketches, schematics and equations in my sleep. My subconscious appears to want me to build a machine of some sort. Curiosity dictates that I comply.  
\- From the personal notes of Robert Lutece, dated 13 th of September 1893_

Rosalind Lutece was not having a good day. In fact, she hadn’t had a good day for about three years now.

This had nothing to do with the fact that she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in about a week, resulting in a series of crippling headaches and occasional nosebleeds. It wasn’t that she was essentially doing the job of four people, considering that her lab assistants were effectively useless. It wasn’t even the cheap, malfunctioning equipment that she was forced to use. In fact, her problem was rather more straightforward.

In all of the years she had spent working, Rosalind Lutece had effectively gotten nowhere.

Somehow, she had expected her career to be marginally more successful than it had turned out to be. She had been working for almost half a decade, and what did she have to show for it? A small, dingy lab filled with lazy, incompetent assistants, and dozens of brilliant ideas that never quite got off the ground. She needed funding, but none ever seemed to surface – not for any substantial projects anyway. She felt as though she was condemned to stay in this tiny lab for the rest of her life, making the most basic of discoveries for a collection of fat old men who just wanted to turn a profit.

What made it worse was that she had nowhere else to go. She had dreamed of this job ever since she was a young child – sometimes, even literally – and she certainly wasn’t the type to just stop and give up on all of her dreams, undoing all of her hard work simply because it wasn’t working out the way she had planned. She knew that she could be a brilliant physicist. If only she could convince all of those short-sighted, moneyed ignoramuses of that! The wealthy, in her opinion, tended to have no appreciation for the more important things in life. It was one of the reasons that she’d left her home and come to America in the first place; although, in hindsight, she wished that she had taken a few more precious family heirlooms before she did.

All things considered, what she needed was a miracle. But miracles are far and few between, and Rosalind was sure that they wouldn’t happen to someone as sceptical as herself. Nevertheless, as she stormed into the lab on that chilly September morning, she couldn’t help but hope that this would be the day that would change everything. Not that it had worked the last thousand days that she had hoped that, of course.

As she strode through the doorway, however, one of her assistants shyly approached her. That was unusual. Generally, they didn’t have the courage to even look her in the eye this early in the morning.

Ignoring the young man’s stammering, she stalked over to the small workspace that she called her office, once again cursing the lack of space inside the tiny building. Her ‘office’, really, was more of a little cubbyhole that happened to have a desk inside it. The room was virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the lab – it was just as cold and grey, with various unfinished projects left abandoned within. Hoisting her skirts up with one hand, Rosalind carefully stepped over a still-sparking bit of machinery and made her way over to the desk. It was the only bit of furniture inside the small room, and it too was covered in loose, ink-stained sheets of paper and spare mechanical parts.

 _One of these days, I am going to get some organisation in here,_ she thought irritably, flicking through the first few pages that lay strewn across her workspace. It was just another banal series of notes that documented the details of whatever it was they were supposed to be working on, scrawled across the page in blotchy blue ink. She suspected that she hadn’t even been paying attention when she wrote the notes, considering that she had exactly no recollection of doing so.

Suppressing a sigh, she pushed herself out from the desk, resigned to the fact that she probably should be getting some real work done sooner or later. She stood, knocking a week’s worth of papers and a half-full bottle of ink onto the floor, and made her way out of the office.

Her resolute march was interrupted when she walked straight into the assistant from before, who had been hovering nervously in the doorframe. Stopping, she folded her arms and stared down her nose at him. His eyes widened in apprehension, pale hands clutching his clipboard like a lifeline. Raising an eyebrow, she gave him an irritated look before motioning him to speak with one hand.

He ran a hand through his sandy hair, swallowing nervously. “Good morning, M-Madame Lutece,” he ventured, thinking that at least to be safe ground.

“Good morning, Mister Francis,” she replied curtly. “I assume you have a good reason to be bothering me this morning?”

The young man seemed to be studying his scuffed shoes intently. “S-sorry, Madame Lutece,” he stuttered. “But there’s a man here to see you.”

That gave her reason to pause. She hadn’t been expecting anyone, and it wasn’t as though their little lab was a hive of social activity. Usually, the only people to visit were people they owed money to, and occasionally the people who funded their projects when they needed status updates. Frowning, she shot Francis a quizzical look, and he shrank further back away from her.

“Who?” Rosalind’s mind raced, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for why anyone would be bothering to come and visit her, let alone at work. “It’s not anyone important, I presume.”

Francis just shrugged. “He won’t tell me who he is. Just keeps saying he needs to talk to you.”

“Well, tell him to leave!” Exasperated, she resumed her marching towards the research section of the lab, barking the remainder of her instructions over her shoulder. “Inform him that I am _tremendously_ busy right now, as you should well know.”

She only managed to get a few feet away before Francis was on her tail again, eyes wide with alarm. It seemed that he didn’t want to upset either party. “I tried that!” he said, desperately. “H-he just kept insisting! Had to show him into one of the back rooms just to get him to shut up, now he won’t go.”

Once again, Rosalind took a moment to close her eyes, count to ten and reflect on the overwhelming idiocy of her assistants. “But I wasn’t expecting-” she protested lamely, before realising that there was really no way she could get out of this. At least this mysterious stranger might offer something in the way of a distraction from her tedious workday, most likely as a way of venting her pent-up anger at her situation.

“Oh, very well,” she sighed. “Tell him I’ll be there in a moment, will you?”

“Yes, ma’am! Er, he’s in room three, ma’am.” Francis scuttled off, no doubt relieved that he didn’t have to talk to her any more.

With another drawn-out sigh, she leaned against the cold stone wall, pinching the bridge of her nose. It was true; she really did have a lot of work to do without wasting her time in ejecting this new interloper. But apparently, her assistants were so useless that she was the only one in the entire lab who could get rid of him. Not for the first time, she considered firing the lot of them and doing everything herself, but there was only so much that one person could do while still having to attend to mundane tasks like eating and sleeping.

Needless to say, as she marched into room three, she was not in the best of moods to talk to anybody. Which, in retrospect, is why what happened next was so surprising.

Room three was just another one of the labs they used for research. It was no different from the other workspaces in the building; dull grey walls and floors, a few benches and desks furnishing the room, sparking machinery thrown haphazardly about wherever it would fit, and actual working equipment was far and few between.

On the other side of the room, the stranger was inspecting a half-built machine that Rosalind recognised as her aborted ‘Lutece Field’ project. He turned as he heard her come in, a broad smile beginning to light up his face. She stopped in the doorway, studying the man curiously. He was about her height, with bright copper hair parted neatly to the right. Unlike most of the people she got in the lab, he dressed smartly, in a suit that seemed strangely identical to her usual apparel. In fact, there was an air of odd familiarity about him, a disquieting sense of déjà vu that Rosalind elected to ignore.

“Good morning,” she greeted him, her voice trimmed with an edge of suspicion. “I assume your reason for being here is vitally important, otherwise I shall declare this entire encounter a waste of time and get back to my work.”

The stranger raised an eyebrow, his cheerful expression unchanged. “I assure you,” he said, a hint of playfulness to his tone. “This matter is most urgent.”

“Oh? Do tell.” Tapping her foot, Rosalind gave him an icy look, one that was usually guaranteed to send any given lab assistant running for cover. To her surprise, however, the stranger seemed unperturbed.

He paused, staring off into space for a second. “To be honest, I’m not entirely sure where I should begin,” he said hesitantly, apparently trying to gauge her reaction.

“You’re not helping your cause,” she deadpanned, folding her arms with a look of derision. “Who _are_ you, anyway?”

At this, the man’s grin widened, his eyes glinting mischievously. “My name,” he announced, chest swelling with pride. “Is Robert Lutece.”

Rosalind’s frown deepened. ‘Lutece’ was hardly a common name – in the very least, she had never met another outside of her immediate relatives. To have this man show up, looking so similar to her and claiming to share her name was a shock, to say the least. What was he trying to do? Claim to be her kin for some sort of benefit? It may have worked on her relatives back at home, but she couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would try and pull that on her.

“I see,” she said carefully, trying not to expose her surprise. “And I suppose you’re some sort of long-lost cousin, are you?”

“Not quite.” His tone was stoic, his face fallen. It looked as though he had been expecting her to recognise him – why, she had no idea.

“Not quite?” she echoed, almost mocking him now.

“No, I…” His voice trailed off into a confused silence. “You’re sure that you have no idea who I am?” He looked back at her, eyes wide with a misplaced hope. She merely sneered, shaking her head.

“Not in the slightest. And, might I add, you assuming that I do is rather narcissistic on your part.”

“Well, I had hoped...” Deciding to cut his losses, the man gave a rueful sigh, suddenly keen to avoid Rosalind’s knowing gaze. “But never mind that now. I expect I should explain myself, then?”

“That _is_ what I asked you to do.”

The man wandered to the other side of the room, righting a pair of overturned chairs and indicating that she sit on one. His story, he explained as she came to join him, was one that she should probably sit for. Scepticism rising with every passing second, Rosalind sat, figuring that since she had entertained the madman for this long, she might as well hear him out fully.

“You see,” he began, tapping the tips of his fingers together. “I am a physicist as well, Ros-Madame Lutece. And until recently, I wasn’t having much luck with securing funding and the like.”

Rosalind nodded suspiciously, her eyes narrowed. This definitely sounded as though it was going to be a plea for money. Just perfect.

“That is, until I started having these...odd dreams.” He looked uneasy, shifting nervously in his chair. “Dreams of another place. A city in the sky, a girl who could open gaps in the universe...and a scientist who both was and was not myself. A woman named Rosalind.”

“How could you-what are you talking about?” Rosalind interrupted angrily. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. It sounded suspiciously like he was describing her own dreams from the last few months – but that was impossible. She had told nobody of the nightmares that had left her tossing and turning at night, to wake at dawn in a cold sweat with only those vague recollections left to her. At first, she had dismissed it as the workings of an overactive imagination, but the dreams continued to plague her.

The man, however, only looked triumphant. “One night,” he continued, not answering her. “I awoke to find that I had somehow managed to draw up blueprints for a machine as I slept. The result was a most extraordinary device; one that opens tears in the fabric of space, time and probability, allowing one to see through the future, or the past. Or, as it happened, other realities.”

“Do you expect me to believe any of this?” she said furiously, dimly realising that she had catapulted out of her chair, knocking it onto the floor in the process. He ignored her, standing up and looking her straight in the eye.

“I come from a slightly different world, Madame Lutece. One where most things remain the same, but where you were born as a man named Robert. In other words, where you are me.”

“I reiterate, do you expect me to believe this-this ludicrous tale?” Rosalind was lost for words, stuttering her objections angrily. What he was proposing was insane, preposterous even. He was obviously some sort of madman, who thought he could just wander in off the streets and try and trick her with his bizarre rambling. Well, it wasn’t going to work. She was far too intelligent to fall for that, even if he did have some unexplained knowledge of her.

“Yes,” he said simply. “Not only because it’s true, but because I know you’ve been having the same dreams too.”

“You can’t know that,” she mumbled, but she could tell he wasn’t fooled. There was no way to deny it. She had been dreaming about this floating city for too long to even think of claiming otherwise. However this man knew, whatever his source of information, he wasn’t wrong. In some ways, that was more terrifying than his allegations.

“But I have come to believe,” he added, studying her reactions intently. “That they are more than just dreams. I think they are memories. I think we’re remembering a different life, in a different reality.” Pausing, he raised an eyebrow. “In a city called Columbia.”

She was about to argue. She was about to fling all of his words back in his face, to point out all of the ways that he was wrong, all of the things he said that couldn’t possibly be true. But her vision was blurring, and her head was pounding, and she couldn’t even think straight, let alone structure a decent argument.

With a muffled yelp of pain, she slid to the floor, clutching her head. Before her eyes, she could see the dreams. The things that she tried to forget, the disjointed visuals from a time long forgotten. All of them, playing like a film reel behind her eyelids.

_A mechanical bird attacks a gleaming bronze tower, a young man shouts as his child is torn from his grasp, she stands alone in a city that is floating through the air, a girl pulls at thin air until a gap opens in reality, she sits in the lab with her brother, working on a large machine as it sparks and whirrs-_

“Rosalind?” The familiar voice snapped her out of her reverie. As her vision came blurrily back, the man was kneeling in front of her, giving her a concerned look and holding out a handkerchief. “Here. Your nose is bleeding.”

She frowned, tapping a finger to her nose. Surely enough, it came away bloody. “So it is,” she said, absently, before remembering herself. “You must excuse me, I-I’m rather not myself at the moment.” Pressing his handkerchief to her nose, she allowed him to help her to her feet before sinking back into a chair, mind still reeling in confusion.

“I’d noticed.” The man smiled softly, carefully righting the chair she had knocked over and sitting on it. “Does this mean that you remember me?” he asked, his tone cautious.

“I remember...some things,” she said, hesitantly. “I don’t know if-”

As she was talking, she looked up, meeting his icy blue eyes. In that second, her sight blurred once more, white spots dancing across her vision as her memories started to corrode.

_He sits in front of her, nose bleeding and muttering to himself in a confused tone. He scribbles her theories down onto a nearby blackboard, writing at the speed of light to keep up with her thoughts. He stands next to her, a smile etched into his face and his hand tight around hers, as their greatest invention explodes before them._

“Rosalind!” Once again, she bounced back from delirium to the sound of his voice. But this time, something was different. As she looked around the small room, she realised that the faint dabs of colour seem that little bit brighter, sounds that little bit sharper, and her head that little bit clearer. The pounding headache that she had endured for over a month had ceased. She breathed in, fresh air swelling her lungs. For the first time in months, she felt strangely calm. Her irritability had seeped away, leaving her feeling more alive. More herself.

And as the concerned face of the stranger loomed into her line of vision, she suddenly realised that he was no stranger after all.

“...Robert?”

Robert Lutece beamed, embracing his sister warmly. His grin was infectious, and she soon found herself to be smiling along with him, caught up in his ecstatic mood. As they stood, she could feel the suppressed memories pouring back into her mind, all the knowledge of her other life suddenly being revealed to her in a glorious burst of clarity.

Suddenly, he paused, as though he had forgotten something. “How much do you remember?” he asked, his expression defaulting back to its anxious state. She shook her head, eyes tight shut in an effort to remember.

“Not everything. It’s still a bit fuzzy, I’m afraid.” She shrugged ruefully, and he smiled at her, a misty look in his eyes.

“The mind of the subject-”

“Will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist,” she finished, almost automatically.

“You remember that.” It wasn’t a question. He looked at her with something resembling pride, obviously pleased that his quote had triggered her memory.

“How could I forget!” With a nostalgic smile, she felt one of her new memories bobbed to the surface; Robert sitting at a desk, pouring over notes for his book, occasionally throwing out a statistic or two for her to verify. “I recall enough,” she said, with an air of finality. Robert, however, wasn’t convinced.

“How much is enough?”

“We built a floating city. We kidnapped a girl from her own reality, then found a way to bring her back. And there was a man.” She paused for a moment, trying to remember the name. “Comstock. Zachary Comstock, who was also Booker DeWitt. We helped him rescue the girl, and make it so Comstock had never existed.”

This seemed to satisfy her brother, whose grin was widening with every second that passed. He seemed thrilled just to be in the same room as her, as though her very existence proved that it was all real, that Columbia had once existed and that he wasn’t going insane. But there was still something that was bothering her, something that still didn’t make sense.

“How did you even get here?” she asked, rounding on him with a quizzical stare.

“The machine,” he said, as though that explained everything. “I had the blueprint from the dream, so I built it. It was relatively simple to step through a tear and find myself here.”

“But how could you afford it, without Comstock’s money?”

Grinning, Robert reached for the desk behind him, revealing a briefcase that she hadn’t noticed before. He opened it, revealing that it was stuffed with money, row upon row of American dollars looking back at her.

“It’s not as though I need anything from my old reality now,” he said, by way of explanation.

Rosalind could have hugged him. This was exactly what she needed. Not only did she have him, Robert Lutece, who was as much of a genius as she was when it came to all things physics, but he came carrying the money that she needed to see her visions become reality. Visions which, now she thought of it, she was almost positive that he would share. They were the same person, after all, and if her hazy memories of long nights spent in the lab, discussing their theories and debating their ideas until the crack of dawn were correct, he had just the same amount of vision that she did.

“Although I must confess, I’m not entirely sure what to do now,” he admitted sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck. “I hadn’t exactly planned this far ahead.”

She raised an eyebrow, giving him a mischievous look.

“My dear brother,” she began, taking his arm. “With our new memories, this machine and your case full of money, we can do whatever we please.”

They paused, imagining it. Ideas, long-forgotten, that they were sure they could have made reality, finally becoming a possibility. Theories that lay untested and unproven, worlds of scientific wonderment that were theirs to explore. And they could explore them together, as an unstoppable creative force. They had the knowledge of twenty years study in a lab above the skies locked away in their minds. They had seen the impossible, created the magnificent.

And now, here in her altered reality, they could do it all again, free from Comstock’s shadow, free from the guilt created by DeWitt and the girl, free from everything that could possibly stop them. Together, the whole of creation was theirs to discover, if only they chose it. What person in their right mind would decline that chance? To work, unstoppable, with the only person they could ever work with. To Rosalind, it sounded as though an impossible dream had finally come true.

“My dear sister,” Robert echoed, laughing. “I do believe I like the sound of that.”


	10. Loose Ends

**EPILOGUE – LOOSE ENDS**

_Everything has changed. So why does it feel so familiar? I completely uprooted myself from my reality, forcing myself into a new plane of existence that I had never seen before; and yet, it feels more like I have settled into an old routine, little-remembered but not yet forgotten. I don’t know who we are. I don’t know if I am myself, or this other Robert, one who lived through the destruction of his borrowed world. Perhaps I am both. But it no longer matters. I am here, with Rosalind and enough money to allow us to do whatever we wish. The future is ours to take!_  
There is just one thing that I need to do first.  
 - From the personal notes of Robert Lutece, undated.

“Mister DeWitt? Mister DeWitt!”

Robert pounded on the door of the ramshackle apartment, wrinkling his nose from the acrid stench of his surroundings. The apartment was at the end of a narrow alleyway, dark and dingy even at midday. It wasn’t where Robert could usually be found. However, it looked exactly like the apartment he had seen in his nightmares, so at least he knew that he had the right place. The sound of yelling made him anxiously check behind him, to make sure that there weren’t any undesirables around. The alleyway was clear. This was not reassuring.

At last, the door swung open, revealing an unshaven young man holding an infant in his arms, wrapped in white cloth. The man looked up at him blearily, instinctively clutching the child to his chest. Robert’s eyes flashed with recognition. Yes, this was definitely the DeWitt that he had seen in the nightmare.

“Huh?” DeWitt grunted, frowning in Robert’s general direction. “What d’ya want?”

“Here. Take this,” Robert held out an envelope to him, and he regarded it with some suspicion before tentatively taking it from him.

“What is it?” DeWitt held the envelope in front of him, squinting at it. Robert resisted the urge to roll his eyes at him. Somehow, he knew that antagonising DeWitt would not end well at all.

“It’s money, Mister DeWitt,” he explained, calmly. “Enough to wipe away your debt, as well as some extra for you and the child.”

DeWitt’s frown deepened. With one hand, he tore open the top of the envelope – revealing a wad of banknotes that were concealed within. He looked back to Robert, his expression now one of pure shock. “How did you...who are you? Why’re you-?”

Robert smiled. “Better not to ask questions, Mister DeWitt. Good day.”

“Wait!” DeWitt yelled, stumbling after him, the child still clutched to his chest. Robert ignored him, continuing to walk away, until another thought occurred to him.

“One more thing,” he added, turning once again to face the astonished man. “Look after her. And don’t get into any more trouble.” And with that, he turned a corner, disappearing once more into the darkness.

*

Robert leant against a tree at the base of the Eiffel Tower, watching the gardens in front of him. It was a calm day, the air warm but not hot, with a light breeze that ruffled his clothing. It was also, according to a newspaper he had picked up shortly after arriving, the 21st of July, in the year 1912.

As he scanned the scene before him, he noticed a particular couple coming towards him. A man and his younger daughter were walking arm-in-arm, the girl beaming excitedly as she took in the sights of Paris. Although DeWitt seemed much better off than when Robert had last seen him, clean-shaven and dressed in a cheap-looking but neat grey suit, he was still recognisable as the man they had dragged through realities in that other world. The girl, meanwhile, looked pretty much the same as she had in Columbia, wearing a dress in her signature shade of blue and a large grin as she clutched her father’s arm, chattering excitedly to him.

Smiling, Robert watched them as they walked. There was no need for him to interfere; that wasn’t his intention in coming here. He had simply travelled through a tear to DeWitt’s location on that specific day, trying to ascertain how well his plan had worked.

Despite the fact that he had already seen DeWitt and the child, safe and happy in his old reality, he still wasn’t completely satisfied. He knew what DeWitt was like, had seen his earlier descent into alcoholism and self-loathing. Even though the main reason for that had been erased, he still wasn’t sure that DeWitt could be a good father to the girl, and actually look after her as she deserved. He was only a young man after all, and even with Robert’s money, a child is a responsibility that not everyone could live up to.

But they were in Paris. Paris, where the girl had dreamed of visiting all of her life. It was, to Robert’s knowledge, her ultimate fantasy to walk the Parisian streets, to stand on top of the Eiffel Tower. And there she was, chattering away happily on the arm of her father. Whatever had happened between now and the last time he had seen her, when she was still just a child, the girl was happy. In the end, that was all he really wanted.

He turned away with a smile, satisfied that both of them were safe and happy in this new world, not needing any more interference from him. There was just one more place that he wanted to check.

*

Cars zoomed past a New York alleyway, as music blared from a nearby window, filing the air with sound. Neon signs flashed in front of Robert’s face, making him blink in confusion from the noise and light. The date, according to one such sign, was New Year’s Eve, 1983. He paused, needing to take a moment to soak it all in. This was the future of his reality, a time he could never have seen otherwise. Even though the scene in front of him would not have looked that impressive to a casual onlooker, it was almost a hundred years into his future, and not something he was likely to forget.

He looked up, past the blaring lights and towering buildings, to the dark and cloudy heavens above. Only the stars looked back, dim and distant in the midnight sky. The future that they had seen in the tears had not occurred. Columbia was just a hazy memory, never an actual threat to anybody. They were safe.

Turning almost reluctantly, Robert began to make his way back to the alley he had emerged from and the tear that would take him home. As he did so, he passed a bench where an elderly woman in a white blouse and blue skirt sat, staring dreamily up at the stars with a faraway look in her eyes. It was the girl, he recognised with a start, over ninety years old but still active. He found himself smiling wistfully. The girl had a life, and a long one at that. Whatever else happened, they had done it. She was free.

He walked past her without the barest acknowledgement, and slipped back down the side alley.

In front of him was an eerie light, cast by the glowing window between the worlds that sat at one end. His sister was sitting in front of their machine, one hand on the control panel, ready for when he decided to return. Seeing him approaching, she stood, hands on hips and boredom evaporating.

 “Satisfied?” Rosalind Lutece said through the tear, smirking at the barely-concealed grin on his face. He shrugged, refusing as ever to let her cynicism get to him.

“Indeed,” he chuckled, stopping just before he stepped through. His sister rolled her eyes, extending a hand to him through the window, imploring him not to linger any further. He took it, letting himself be pulled back into the universe that he was soon to make his home, to the time that he knew.

“Come on,” Rosalind smiled, dragging him further into her lab and pulling a lever. “I think that’s far too much sentimentality for one day, don’t you? And besides, there’s work to be done.”

In a New York alleyway, there was a faint burst of light as the tear between realities closed one final time. As she sat on her bench, the old woman didn’t even turn her head, but continued to look up to the stars. A single tear formed in her eye, and she wiped it away, wondering why on earth she was crying when she felt so peaceful.

And somewhere, in another world, the twins set to work.

There was science to be done, discoveries to be made, fundamental laws of nature to rewrite, and nothing that could stand in their way. Comstock was dead. The girl was safe. Columbia had never existed. There was just Rosalind and Robert Lutece, united at last in their curiosity and scientific prowess, ready and able to make their mark on the world.

And that was perfectly fine with them.


End file.
